Johannes Reimann awarded dissertation prize of Philipps-Universität Marburg

Congratulations to Dr. Johannes Reimann, doctoral student in SFB-project B6 (Höfer), for being awarded a prize by Philipps- Universität Marburg for his excellent dissertation presented in 2018.

In his thesis entitled “Charge carried dynamics and photocurrents in the Dirac cone of topological insulators” Johannes Reimann investigated a novel class of materials, topological insulators. These materials, discovered only a decade ago, are insulating in the volume, but conductive at their surfaces and at their interfaces with conventional materials.

In the framework of his thesis, Johannes Reimann advanced the development of time- and angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy within the group of Prof. Höfer. In particular, his work is the first to combine this powerful technique with Terahertz excitation and to achieve subcycle time resolution. In collaboration with the group of Prof. Rupert Huber in Regensburg, he succeeded in taking band structure movies of electrical currents carried by Dirac electrons as they are driven by an intense THz wave. First results were published in Nature in September 2018 (see also SFB news, university press release.

The results of Johannes Reimann’s work hold great promise to realize new lightwave-driven electronics, a concept to increase the clock rates of conventional semiconductor devices by a factor of 1000 and more. Moreover, the successful demonstration of the combination of intense THz pulses as pump and angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy (ARPES) as probe, has triggered worldwide experimental efforts to take advantage of THz-APRES for time-resolved investigation of a variety of solids, surfaces and interfaces.

See here for details of the event.