Gerhard Ertl Lecture & Award

The Ertl Lecture Award was established in 2008 by the three Berlin universities (Humboldt University, Technical University and Free University) and the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society and is awarded once a year. It commemorates former FHI Director Gerhard Ertl's Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which he received in 2007. The prize honours outstanding personalities and researchers in the field of catalysis where Ertl carried out exceptional research for many decades. The prize, sponsored by BASF, includes a one-week research stay at the participating Berlin institutions and a keynote lecture. The winner is typically announced in Spring, the lecture takes place around the December 10th, the anniversary of Ertl's Nobel Prize reception.

Visualizing Electron Localization and Minibands in WS₂/WSe₂ Moiré Superlattices

• PC Department Online Seminar
• Date: Nov 29, 2021
• Time: 09:00 AM (Local Time Germany)
• Speaker: Conrad Stansbury
• University of California, Berkeley
• Host: Tommaso Pincelli

The ability to engineer flattened electronic bands by controlling interlayer effects in moiré superlattices of two-dimensional materials has opened the door for material physicists to understand and control correlated electron phenomena in an unprecedentedly broad class of materials. Despite wide-ranging transport and optical signatures of correlated phases, a holistic understanding of how exotic quantum phases emerge remains elusive. [more]

Probing Electronic Structure and Magnetism in Low Dimensionality - An Experimental Approach

• PC Department Seminar
• Date: Nov 3, 2022
• Time: 11:00 AM (Local Time Germany)
• Speaker: Alessandro De Vita
• Università degli studi di Milano - CNR Istituto Officina dei Materiali
• Location: Building G
• Room: Seminar Room 2.06
• Host: Tommaso Pincelli

The ever-growing need for next-generation electronic and magnetic devices calls for new solutions for the engineering of quantum materials, in terms of miniaturization, energy consumption and speed compared to reference benchmarks, e.g. 18 ps for the Larmor magnetization switching. A new paradigm has emerged: the effect of the decrease of dimensionality in magnetic materials is recently being given a large deal of attention. [more]

Ultrafast Dynamics in a Photo-induced Symmetry-breaking Transition

• PC Department Seminar
• Date: Jan 22, 2024
• Time: 11:00 AM (Local Time Germany)
• Speaker: Francesco Grandi
• Technische Hochschule Aachen
• Location: Building G
• Room: 2.06
• Host: Tommaso Pincelli

The study of the suppression of an order parameter by an external perturbation and the following recovery of the broken-symmetry phase is a problem relevant to systems even beyond condensed matter physics. In the context of pump-probe experiments, it has been tackled considering the suppression of the charge density wave order parameter in several compounds, and it was found a relevant role played by the fluctuations [1,2]. [more]