UVic physics graduate Pramodh Senarath Yapa believes electrons will dance together for better conductivity and has made an award-winning musical to demonstrate the behaviour of these sub-atomic particles.
“I like to think of it as the social life of electrons,” said Yapa, who finished his master’s degree in physics at the University of Victoria in 2018.
His thesis comes with an impenetrable title: Non-Local Electrodynamics of Superconducting Wires: Implications for Flux Noise and Inductance. But then Yapa added music, rap-style lyrics and choreography, and his research danced its way into an award-winning video.
On Friday, it was announced that Yapa’s video was the winner of the 2018 Dance Your PhD contest, hosted by Science magazine and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The contest, in its 11th year, challenges scientists to toss aside their jargon, graphs and numerical equations and explain their work through interpretive dance. The winner gets $1,000 — along with what the magazine calls “immortal geek fame.”
Yapa, who is now studying for his PhD at the University of Alberta, said his first thoughts around electrons and their social life was their behaviour at super-low temperatures.
In an interview from Edmonton, he said that at room temperature, electrons and their negative electrical charge will repel each other.
That’s their anti-social phase.
But when cooled to many tens — or hundreds — of degrees below 0 C, electrons will pair up like human dancers exposed to music. In that phase, superconductivity occurs.
Yapa’s video also contains a segment explaining how impurities in a super-cooled metal will act like “punks,” turning the movement of the pleasant electron dance into a thrashing mosh pit.
Creation of his music video began with UVic’s 2018 Ideafest, the annual fair for scientists and academics to demonstrate their research for the public.
Yapa said he has played music, guitar mostly, for about 13 years, made short films and has a small recording studio in his room. He also enjoys swing dancing.
So within the space of a few weeks in January 2018, he wrote the music, the lyrics and engaged the help of some choreographers. He also enlisted 17 other grad students and members of the swing dance club as players in his video.
“It was kind of like all my hobbies coming together with my research,” Yapa said.
