Happy Birthday, Wolfgang Gudat!

On 11 June 2023, Professor Dr Wolfgang Gudat will turn 80. From 1989 to 2000, Wolfgang Gudat was scientific director of BESSY. Under his leadership, the BESSY II project was approved and the storage ring in Adlershof was built and equipped with state-of-the-art instruments. He founded the Friends of HZB and is honorary chairman of the association. On his birthday, his colleagues and the HZB management wish him all the best!

Wolfgang Gudat wrote his diploma thesis on optical constants of III-V semiconductors under Prof. Ruprecht Haensel in Hamburg and built a monochromator for this purpose at the time. During his doctorate with Prof. Christoph Kunz, he determined optical constants over wide energy ranges, which became the worldwide standard. At that time, he introduced the now common term of electron yield or total yield spectroscopy. As a postdoc at IBM in Yorktown Heights, USA, Wolfgang Gudat worked on X-ray lithography and on III-VI semiconductor surfaces using photoelectron spectroscopy. At the Jülich Research Centre, the nuclear research facility at the time, his focus was later on spin-resolved photoemission, which was operated there for the first time ever with angular resolution and is now used as a powerful investigation method at most of the world's sychrotron radiation sources. Since the method is intensity-hungry, Wolfgang Gudat developed the first undulator for BESSY I from Jülich, which was also the first undulator in the world to be operated in a vacuum. 

From BESSY to BESSY II

Wolfgang Gudat took over the scientific management of BESSY in 1989, after the untimely death of Prof. Dr. Ernst Eckhard Koch. Together with Prof. Dr. Eberhard Jaeschke and many other colleagues, he pushed ahead with the planning of BESSY II on the former site of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR in Adlershof. Construction work could begin as early as March 1993. After only four years of construction, BESSY II went into operation in September 1998. User operation started in January 1999. Since then, BESSY II has become an internationally very attractive X-ray source, with thousands of guest users every year.

Friends of Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin e.V.

Shortly after taking office, Gudat also founded the "Association of Friends and Sponsors of the Berlin Electron Storage Ring Society for Synchrotron Radiation (BESSY)", which later became the Friends of HZB. Since 1990, the association has awarded the Ernst-Eckhard Koch Prize in memory of Ernst-Eckhard Koch for outstanding doctoral theses in the field of synchrotron radiation. Wolfgang Gudat was deputy chairman of the Friends of HZB for many years and is now honorary chairman of the association. 

Promoting young scientists

As a professor at the University of Potsdam, young scientists are also close to his heart. For example, he initiated the annual holiday course "Experimenting with Synchrotron Radiation" as a cooperation between the University of Potsdam and BESSY, which continues as the "HZB Photon School" and now attracts participants from all over the world.