Carl-Ramsauer-Award for excellent dissertation
Dr. Raphael Jay has received this year's Carl-Ramsauer-Prize of the German Physical Society of Berlin. © Max Threlfall
Dr. Raphael Jay has received this year's Carl-Ramsauer-Prize of the German Physical Society of Berlin (DPGzB). The prize honours outstanding dissertations in physics and related fields and will be awarded during a festive colloquium on 18 November 2020 in the Magnus-Haus.
Dr. Raphael Jay studied ultrafast charge transfer dynamics in iron complexes during his doctorate at the University of Potsdam under the supervision of Prof. Alexander Föhlisch. In the context of the EDAX project at BESSY II, he carried out measurements with ultra-short X-ray pulses, whereby the experimental infrastructure was also used for measurements at the Free Electron Laser LCLS in Stanford.
The complex measurement results were analysed within the HZB Virtual Institute "Dynamic Pathways in multimensional Landscapes" in collaboration with Stockholm University. In future, this type of experiment will also be possible at the European XFEL in Hamburg, which was developed in parallel within the EDAX project. Raphael Jay is now continuing his scientific work at the University of Uppsala.
- Ultrafast demagnetisation - Thinner iron, stronger effectThe thinner an iron film, the more easily it can be demagnetised by a laser pulse. Researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen, working with Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and other partners, have discovered why: the key lies in the magnetic order at the material's interfaces. In the long term, these findings could contribute to the development of new technologies for magnetic data storage. The results have been published in the scientific journal Advanced Science.
- Spin waves inside a nano-oscillator imaged for the first timeFor the first time, researchers have directly imaged the magnetisation dynamics inside a spin Hall nano-oscillator — a nanoscale device that converts direct current into tunable microwave signals and is a promising building block for energy-efficient wireless communication and brain-inspired computing. A Swedish–German team led by the University of Gothenburg and Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) achieved this using time-resolved scanning transmission X-ray microscopy at the MAXYMUS instrument at BESSY II. The results, now published in Advanced Materials, reveal spin-wave features that had escaped previous, indirect measurement techniques.
- BESSY II: High-resolution insights into individual biomolecules and catalystsVery small biological samples and even individual biomolecules can now be examined under near-physiological conditions with high confidence at the BESSY II infrared beamline with a newly validated and improved technique: The nanoscale infrared spectroscopy (s-SNOM) with ultra-thin silicon-based membranes. An international team demonstrated after an initial proof of concept, that high-resolution (a few tens of nanometres) nano-IR measurements reliably match expected far-field IR spectra in an aqueous environment. This methodological advance provides a solid foundation for studying biomaterials or observing catalytic processes in a liquid environment.