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.
- Only at BESSY II worldwide: IR nanoscopy at very long THz wavelengthsThe team at the IRIS beamline at BESSY II has created a new experimental option: They achieved infrared nanoscopy with a spatial resolution of around 50 nm at very long THz wavelengths. This was possible thanks to a temporal pattern of light pulses known as the low-alpha operating mode at BESSY II. Worldwide, BESSY II is the only synchrotron light source at which users could perform nanoscopy in a single setup from 25 to 4000 cm-1, a unique opportunity for ultra-broadband characterisation of complex materials at the nanoscale in both the life sciences and materials sciences.
- 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.