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

An international research team has demonstrated that ultrashort laser pulses can be used to protect one of the DNA building blocks against destruction induced by vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) radiation. A second infrared laser flash prevented the adenine molecule from disintegrating. more

Researchers from the MPSD and UNIST in South Korea have discovered that the existing method to calculate the Mott insulating state in 1T-TaS₂ is flawed. The team suggests a different approach instead to calculate electron "traffic jams". more

A novel open source tool kit lets researchers drive simulations from Jupyter Notebooks, with narrative comments, the commands to execute the simulation and the final results. This new approach makes research more reproducible and efficient. more

Theoretical physicist Ofer Neufeld receives a Humboldt Fellowship to investigate ultrafast dynamics in strongly light-driven condensed matter systems in Ángel Rubio’s group. more

Ángel Rubio, the Director of the MPSD’s Theory Department, has been elected a Fellow of the European Physical Society (EPS). The Society highlights "his pioneering contributions to computational solid-state physics" in its citation. more