Professor Dehnen with Prof. Dr. Katharina Krause (president of Philipps-Universität Marburg), Prof. Dr. Carmen Bickle, and Dr. Nina Schumacher (women and equal opportunity officer). (Photo: Henrik Isenberg)

The “Frauenförderpreis” of Philipps-Universität Marburg is awarded every two years since 1998 and worth 2500 EUR. It recognizes Prof. Dr. Stefanie Dehnen and Prof. Dr. Carmen Birkle for their strong mentorship and in the case of Professor Dehnen in particular for her participation as a mentor for early-career female academic staff in the Hessen-wide project “SciMento” and her enduring engagement for a family-friendly research environment.

In balancing a professorship and family-life with four young children, Stefanie Dehnen is living proof that having both, a research career and a family is possible.

Copyright Scientia.

In the October issue of Scientia an outreach research publication entitled “Collaborating to Study Interfaces in Miniaturised Materials” covers our collaborative research center.

Scientia is a bimonthly science communication publication. The goal is to connect science and society by presenting research in an understandable, informative and attractive way to the general public. The article outlines motivation, scientific goals and methods of SFB 1083 “Structure and Dynamics of Internal Interfaces”. It highlights several results of the first funding period.

The publication is also accessible as a “scipod”-audiobook.

Publication

SFB 1083 – Collaborating to Study Interfaces in Miniaturised Materials
Scientia (2018) DOI: 10.26320/SCIENTIA255

More than 80 participants, from master-student to principal investigator, from Marburg, Gießen, Jülich and Münster ventured to Kloster Volkenroda in Thuringia for a multi-day seminar featuring talks and posters by the programs’ young research staff.

After an International Summer School in 2014 in San Sebastian in Spain, co-organized by SFB guest project GP1 based at the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC), it was the second time that the two DFG-funded programs came together to discuss their science projects, present the latest results and provide a networking forum for existing and new collaborations.

The meeting provided a balanced mix of more senior presentations and first-time talks or posters by new PhD-students and the current crop of MSc-students in the various projects. The meeting also provided a great forum for interaction with those program-members from outside of Marburg – seeing each other in person, standing side-by-side while discussing science, forming joint memories of the “pilgrimage to Mühlhausen”, and simply talking with each other form a solid base for future interaction by email, skype and phone.

For more details check out the program.

As part of their ongoing theory-experiment collaboration, members from project B4 (group of Prof. S.W. Koch) jointly with colleagues from Regensburg (group of Prof. Huber) and the University of Michigan (former co-PI in B4 Prof. Kira) demonstrate how to control and manipulate the quantum states of optically excited electrons in modern quasi-two dimensional semiconductor materials. In particular, they show that the valley pseudo-spin in a tungsten diselenide system can be switched at ultrafast speeds by applying an intense light field.

Energy-landscape in a WSe₂-semiconductor depicted as blue hills. Electrons are accelerated from one valley to the next (yelloworange) with the colored arrows indicating change of the valley-pseudospin. (Ill.: F. Langer, Univ. Regensburg; use only in context of paper published).

In today’s information technology, quantum effects still play a mostly supporting role. This should change in the future, as research into quantum information technology paves the way towards efficient storage, processing and communication – eventually replacing “Moore’s law” with its own. The basis are robust and quickly switchable electronic states provided by the so-called “valley pseudospin” that can be changed when energized electrons are optically driven between distinct energetic valleys in the hexagonal layered materials.

This controlled ultrafast switching between the occupation of different bandstructure minima provides an important step in the new area of light driven electronics, opening the field for lightwave valleytronics. Ultimately this may become important in developing room-temperature quantum signal processing.

Publication

F. Langer, C. P. Schmid, S. Schlauderer, M. Gmitra, J. Fabian, P. Nagler, C. Schüller, T. Korn, P. G. Hawkins, J. T. Steiner, U. Huttner, S. W. Koch, M. Kira & R. Huber, Lightwave valleytronics in a monolayer of tungsten diselenide,
Nature 557 (2018) 76-80, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0013-6

See also press release (
Uni Marburg in German;
UMICH Ann Arbor in English), a video (UMICH Ann Arbor) and articles
in
Oberhessische Presse and Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung.

Contact
Prof. Dr. Stephan W. Koch
Dept. of Physics, Philipps-Universität Marburg
SFB 1083 Project B4 (SW Koch)
Tel. +49 (0)6421 28-21336
Email: Stephan.W.Koch@physik.uni-marburg.de

Pedro Miguel Echenique, external member of SFB 1083 and former PI of guest project “Electron dynamics at organic/inorganic interfaces from first principles” has been awarded a honorary membership of the European Physical Society (EPS). The EPS Council reserves this rare distinction to a maximum of 30 living individuals with exceptional achievements in physics. Current honorary members include four scientists from Germany and one from Spain (https://www.eps.org/page/distinction_honorary).

Professor Echenique was elected by the Council 2018 in Paris for his outstanding achievements as a scientist in the field of Surface Physics, Attophysics, Interaction of charges and radiation with matter and Many-body Physics and for his contributions as an exceptional and tireless advocate of outreach, dissemination and public awareness of physics, notably the creation and development of Passion for Knowledge, which is a large-scale public outreach event in Donostia, Basque Country, promoting science as the driving force behind technological progress and the foundation of human culture.

https://www.epsnews.eu/2018/04/eps-distinctions-2018/