Jérôme Faist, Professor at the Institute for Quantum Electronics at ETH Zürich, has been awarded a Humboldt Prize to pursue his work at the MPSD in Hamburg. His research centers on the fluctuating fields found in a vacuum and how these could be controlled.
Researchers in Hamburg have discovered that the ferroelectric polarization of lithium niobate (LiNbO3) changes in areas well away from the direct ‘hit’ of a laser pulse, with the polarization reversal occurring throughout the entire crystal. The team’s study of this hitherto unknown phenomenon - called nonlocal nonlinear phononics - has been published in Nature Physics.
Hope Bretscher from the Ultrafast Transport in Quantum Materials Group based at the MPSD has been selected for a postdoctoral Research Fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She currently investigates graphene heterostructures using on-chip THz spectroscopy.
Jie Shan, Professor of Applied and Engineering Physics and Physics at Cornell University (USA), and Prineha Narang, Assistant Professor of Computational Materials Science at Harvard University (USA) and currently on a research stay at the MPSD, will be awarded the Mildred Dresselhaus Prize 2021.
Research team involving experimentalists and theorists explores how light can fundamentally alter the properties of solids - and how to harness these phenomena in laser-driven materials for future applications. Their colloquium has been published in Reviews of Modern Physics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A universal Doppler effect limits the maximal spin current in magnetic insulators which have been driven out of equilibrium by magnetic fields. These findings by an international research team present a surprising parallel to what happens in superconductors driven by electric fields and could aid the design of future nano-devices.
MPSD researchers discover a long-lived superconducting state in K3C60 at a temperature five times higher than the one at which superconductivity sets in without photoexcitation. This metastable state, produced with a new type of laser, lasts nearly 10.000 times longer than previously achieved.
Researchers have managed to control and detect oscillations inside an atomic nucleus, as well as the gamma radiation emitted, to within 1.3 zeptoseconds. A zeptosecond is the thousandth part of a billionth of a billionth of a second.