Marcus Bär accepts W2 professorship for X-ray spectroscopy in Erlangen-Nuremberg
Marcus Bär, here in EMIL lab at HZB, has accepted a professorship at FAU in South-Germany. © Phil Dera
Prof. Marcus Bär has accepted a professorship for X-ray spectroscopy at the Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). Bär heads the Department of Interface Design at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB). The new W2 professorship was established in cooperation with HZB and Forschungszentrum Jülich in order to strengthen the Helmholtz-Institute Erlangen-Nürnberg für Renewable Energy (HI ERN). In the future, Bär will also be working on HI ERN research topics at HZB, thereby contributing to the intensification of cooperation.
Marcus Bär studied physics at the University of Potsdam and Environmental Engineering/Renewable Energies at the University of Applied Sciences (FHTW) in Berlin. In 2003 he earned his doctorate in electrical engineering in the field of solar energy research at the Hahn-Meitner-Institut Berlin and at the TU Berlin. Thereafter, Prof. Bär was Emmy-Noether Fellow at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Nevada in Las Vegas/USA. He was promoted to an Adjunct Assistant Research Professor at this department in 2006 and to an Assistant Research Professor in 2007. In 2009 he returned to Berlin and became head of the Helmholtz Young Investigator Group "Improving thin-film solar cells by deliberate interface tailoring" at the HZB. Two years later he was appointed professor for photovoltaics at the BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg.
Prof. Bär's research interests lie in the field of X-ray spectroscopic investigation of the chemical and electronic structure of energy-conversion materials and structures with a focus on thin-film solar cells. In the future, Prof. Bär wants to establish the infrastructure for in-situ and operando investigations of (photo/electro)catalytic materials, which are also interesting to the HI ERN researchers.
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- Iridium-free catalysts for acid water electrolysis investigatedHydrogen will play an important role, both as a fuel and as a raw material for industry. However, in order to produce relevant quantities of hydrogen, water electrolysis must become feasible on a multi-gigawatt scale. One bottleneck is the catalysts required, with iridium in particular being an extremely rare element. An international collaboration has therefore investigated iridium-free catalysts for acidic water electrolysis based on the element cobalt. Through investigations with various methods, among them experiments at the LiXEdrom at the BESSY II X-ray source in Berlin, they were able to elucidate processes that take place during water electrolysis in a cobalt-iron-lead oxide material as the anode. The study is published in Nature Energy.