Orbital Cinema – ERC Synergy Grant for Ulrich Höfer and Stefan Tautz

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The European Research Council (ERC) awarded a Synergy Grant of up to 11.4 million Euros to the project “Photoemission Orbital Cinematography: An ultrafast wave function lab” in short “Orbital Cinema”.

The new project is led by the SFB members Ulrich Höfer and Stefan Tautz, the SFB associated member Rupert Huber in Regensburg, and Peter Puschnig in Graz. It will involve Ulrich Koert and Jens Güdde as associated partners. The central goal of Orbital Cinema is to reach sub-cycle time resolution in orbital videography and to actively shape and functionalize molecular orbitals with lightwaves.

The foundation for this new research direction has been led by two key achievements of SFB 1083. In 2018, the Höfer and Huber groups showed how surface and interface processes driven by strong electric fields can be investigated by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy with sub-cycle time resolution [J. Reimann et al., Nature 562, 396 (2018), see SFB news]. In 2021, the projects B6 (Höfer/Wallauer) and A12 (Tautz/Bocquet/Kumpf) successfully combined photoemission orbital tomography invented by Peter Puschnig with laser-pump-probe techniques and demonstrated that orbital images can be traced in this way on ultrafast time scales [R. Wallauer et al., Science 371, 1056 (2021), see SFB news].

With its ERC Synergy Grants the European Commission funds high risk projects with up to four PIs that target truly groundbreaking research which cannot be tackled by an individual research team alone. Orbital Cinema has several very ambitious goals: On the picosecond timescale, it is to take movies on the orbital level of a chemical reaction from the initial state over transition states to the final product. In the femtosecond timescale, it is the ability to control charge transfer processes at interfaces such as those underlying light harvesting. Finally, at the attosecond timescale, the ultimate goal is to resolve and sculpt what is presently called an instantaneous quantum leap.

Further Information

– Press releases of the European Research Council

– Press releases of the Forschungszentrum Jülich, the universities of Regensburg and Graz

Cyclacenes – ERC Synergy Grant for Michael Gottfried and collaborators

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The European Research Council (ERC) awarded a Synergy Grant of up to 11 million Euros to the project “Tackling the Cyclacene Challenge” in short “TACY”.

Manipulation of a cyclacene precursor on a gold surface with electrons from the tip of a scanning probe microscope. (Graphics: Tobias Kirschbaum)

Marburg chemist Prof. Dr. Michael Gottfried, vice-speaker of SFB 1083 and project leader of A4 and A16, has been awarded an ERC Synergy Grant by the European Research Council (ERC), together with Prof. Dr. Michael Mastalerz from the University of Heidelberg and Prof. Dr. Holger Bettinger from the University of Tübingen. With their project “Tackling the Cyclacene Challenge” (TACY), the three researchers are pursuing the goal of generating a special class of ring-shaped carbon compounds, the cyclacenes, for the first time. The European Research Council funds the project with around 11 million euros. Of this, around 4.5 million euros is allocated for the research work at Philipps-Universität Marburg.

Cyclacenes are tiny sections of carbon nanotubes and, due to their unique chemical, electronic and structural properties, are of particular importance for potential applications, for example in organic electronics. The ERC-funded collaborative project aims to use new approaches to generate cyclacenes. Despite decades of research efforts, it has not yet been possible to produce even a single representative of this substance class. The researchers now want to achieve this goal, the ‘holy grail’, jointly as part of the TACY project.

In the laboratory of the surface and nano scientist in Marburg, molecular precursors synthesized in Heidelberg and Tübingen will be converted into the desired cyclacenes at extremely low temperatures. This is done on gold surfaces in a scanning probe microscope. With this microscope, individual atoms and molecules can not only be imaged, but also selectively modified. This makes it possible to force chemical processes that would not occur on their own. The researcher is looking forward to a new scanning probe microscope, which will be procured with funds from the ERC Synergy Grant. It will allow the researchers not only to image and manipulate molecules, but also to analyze them chemically in detail, which will tremendously help the project.

For further deatils, please see the press releases of the Philipps University Marburg and the European Research Council.