News from the Graduate Center

MPSD Director Angel Rubio along with an elite team of world-renowned scientists— Tal Schwartz (Tel Aviv University), Thomas Ebbesen (University of Strasbourg), and Abraham Nitzan (University of Pennsylvania)—has been awarded a highly competitive ERC Synergy Grant valued at €10 million. This funding will support their research into the electromagnetic effects in molecular systems under strong light-matter coupling, a field at the cutting edge of chemistry and quantum physics.
Michael Ruggenthaler and Dominik Sidler, both Group Leaders in Rubio’s team, will play a central role in achieving the ambitious goals of this project. more

Beyond CMOS - non-binary multicore memory element from nanoscopic racetrack more

MPSD Director Philip Moll has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). In its citation, the Society highlights his achievements in the field of microstructured quantum matter, in particular the “elucidation of three-dimensional electronic transport on the micron-scale in quantum materials by creatively applying focused ion beams to precisely shape samples, thereby revealing previously inaccessible physics.“ more

Orbital angular momentum monopoles, which have been predicted to offer significant advantages for next generation of electronic devices, have now been observed for the first time in chiral materials by scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle and their international collaborators. This groundbreaking discovery, published in the prestigious journal Nature Physics, could mark a major step forward in the development of chiral electronics. more

The importance of disorder in physics is only matched by the difficulty to study it. For example, the remarkable properties of high-temperature superconductors are greatly affected by variations in the chemical composition of the solid. Techniques that enable measurements of such disorder and its impact on the electronic properties, such as scanning tunnelling microscopy, work only at very low temperatures, and are blind to these physics near the transition temperature. Now, a team of researchers of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) in Germany and Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States has demonstrated a new way to study disorder in superconductors using terahertz pulses of light. Adapting methods used in nuclear magnetic resonance to terahertz spectroscopy, the team was able to follow the evolution of disorder in the transport properties up to the superconducting transition temperature for the first time. The work by the Cavalleri group has appeared in Nature Physics. more

Professor Andrea Cavalleri, founding director of the MPSD, is to be honored with the 2024 EPS Europhysics Prize by the European Physical Society. The EPS is awarding the Prize in recognition of his “pioneering studies of photo-induced emergent phases of quantum materials: from enhanced superconductivity to the control of materials topology”. more

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