Talks

In this colloquium, the communicative boundary between science and society in Africa will be explored, using physics as an illustration. Different types of contact zones and scenes will be discussed, as well as the societal impact of staging and narrative formats. Based on our ongoing engagement project Making Science the Star, an overview of the relationship between sender and receiver will be presented, and recipes for tuning this interaction to unlock untapped potential in predominantly non-scientific communities will be analyzed.

DISCLAIMER: This talk contains Season1 Episode2 from the show series Science In The City. This is used with permission from Dr. Stéphane Kenmoe, Producer of the series and Presenter of this talk.

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Bio: Stéphane Kenmoe got a Ph.D. in Physics from the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research in Germany in 2015. He is presently a habilitation candidate at the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. He is also a science popularizer on TV and on social media, a science writer and a novelist. In 2020, he produced the movie ‘’Science in the City’’ (Science dans la Cité) in Cameroon. He is very active in networking for the promotion of early career African scientists and for connecting science and society. He has won many awards for his engagement, among which the 2020 Diversity Prize for Academic Leadership at the University of Duisburg-Essen, the Falling Walls Award for Science Engagement in 2021 and the Award for Prototypes of Humanity of the Dubai Authority for arts and culture in 2022. Since 2022, he is the chief editor of the African Physics Newsletter, an electronic quarterly about physics in Africa published by the American Physical Society. 

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Zoom link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/92725978684?pwd=Yys0ci9JdE0zS054SGxyaWoxZkdUUT09

Ordinary materials are "passive" in the sense that their constituents are typically made by inert particles which are subjected to thermal fluctuations, internal interactions and external fields but do not move on their own. Living systems, like schools of fish, swarms of birds, pedestrians and swimming microbes are called "active matter" since they are composed of self-propelled particles. Active matter is intrinsically in nonequilibrium and exhibits a plethora of novel phenomena as revealed by a recent combined effort of statistical theory, computer simulation and real-space experiments. After an introduction on biological and artificial self-propelled particles [1], the talk will focus on modelling of active Brownian particles and collective phenomena like motility-induced phase separation. Finally effects of inertia and the formation of active complexes will be discussed including an inertial delay [2], the coexistence of two states with different temperatures [3], an active refrigerator [4] and entropons in active crystals [5].[1] For a review, see:  C. Bechinger, R. di Leonardo, H. Löwen, C. Reichhardt, G. Volpe, G. Volpe,Active particles in complex and crowded environments, Reviews of Modern Physics 88, 045006  (2016).[2] C. Scholz, S. Jahanshahi, A. Ldov, H. Löwen, Inertial delay of self-propelled particles, Nature Communications 9, 5156 (1-9) (2018).[3] S. Mandal, B. Liebchen, H. Löwen, Motility-induced temperature differences in coexisting phases, Phys. Rev. Letters 123, 228001 (2019).[4] L. Hecht, S. Mandal, H. Löwen, B. Liebchen, Active refrigerators powered by inertia, Phys. Rev. Letters 129, 178001 (2022).[5] L. Caprini, U. M. B. Marconi, A. Puglisi, H. Löwen, Entropons as collective excitations in active solids, J. Chem. Phys. 159, 041102 (2023).