Ö1 - Science communication in NOA

Project Ö1|Cartarius/Mappes will develop a didactically founded outreach concept for two main target groups, viz. the general audience and pupils of secondary schools. The focus will be on the clarification and demonstration of physical principles that are important in NOA's research. These principles will be connected to the research projects of NOA, and it will be shown why they are important for cutting edge research. For the pupils' insight into modern experimental and theoretical research in physics a NOA lab course – developed within an extended scheme of didactic reconstruction – will be realized in the school student lab of Friedrich Schiller University Jena operated by the Working Group Teaching Methodology in Physics and Astronomy. It will contain analogue experiments including (nonlinear) oscillators or spectroscopy, but also provide insight into basic steps of the researchers' daily work.

In the final stage Deutsches Optisches Museum (D.O.M.), scheduled to open in 2026, will serve as a platform for dissemination. It will offer an excellent opportunity to get in broad contact with the general audience. Showcases of Recent Optics Research, intended to be included in the museum's exhibition with regularly changing contents, will serve as exhibition platform. Two of them will be reserved for NOA projects, which will be presented to all museum visitors based on an adaption of the didactically developed content for the student lab for a general audience. All presentations will permanently be included in the museum's publicly available digital archive. However, the development of NOA Showcases will already start within the funding period, therefore the same concept will be realized in university buildings. The Showcases serve as methods of science communication and are addressing the general audience, aligned by a series of public NOA science talks. One demonstration experiment on quantum imaging will be added to the permanent exhibition at D.O.M.