Institute and Research News

The call has opened for the IMPRS-UFAST graduate school. 19 PhD projects are on offer for 2022 - among them terahertz generation and acceleration, the cavity engineering of 2D twisted materials, polaritonic chemistry, several spectroscopy methods, ab-initio nanoplasmonics and light shaping and other topics. more

Theoreticians at the MPSD predict that a unique laser source could produce highly controllable electric currents in any bulk material. The team’s work has been published in PRL. more

Researchers in Hamburg and Aachen suggest a surprising connection between the nematic behavior of a superconductor in a magnetic field — a state that resembles liquid crystals used in LCDs — and its spiral-like groundstate in the absence of the field. more

MPSD researcher Ankit Disa has accepted a professorship at Cornell University in the United States. He will take up his new post as Assistant Professor of Applied and Engineering Physics at Cornell in July 2022. more

Photons trapped in a cavity can cause a crystal known as Strontium Titanate (SrTiO₃) to become ferroelectric, according to a new study by the MPSD’s Theory group. The findings have been published in PNAS. more

Researchers have watched in real time how molecules move during singlet exciton fission, an important process in light-based technologies. They observed the movements in single crystals comprised of pentacene molecules, showing that a collective motion of molecules may be the origin of the fast timescales connected to this process. more

Professor Philip Moll, from the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, has been appointed as a new director at the MPSD. He joins managing director Andrea Cavalleri, who leads the Condensed Matter Dynamics Department, and the director of the Theory Department, Ángel Rubio. more

MPSD and MIT researchers predict that light trapped in a cavity can be used to create a new kind of particle in a solid, consisting of three components at once: Light (photons), electronic excitations (excitons) and lattice vibrations (phonons). more

Prineha Narang is coming to the MPSD from Harvard University for an extended research stay. She has received two prestigious prizes: A Max Planck Sabbatical Award for her work in Germany and the Humboldt Foundation's Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award for her research work to date. more

James McIver, the leader of the Non-Equilibrium Transport in Quantum Materials group, has accepted an assistant professor position with the Physics Department at Columbia Unversity. His group is part of the collaborative Max Planck New York City Center for Non-Equilibrium Quantum Phenomena. more