Gerhard Ertl Lecture & Award

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.

Speaker: Dr. Sam Beaulieu

Ultrafast Light-Induced Lifshitz Transition

Fermi surface is at the heart of our understanding of the properties of metals and strongly correlated many-body systems. An abrupt change in the Fermi surface topology, also called Lifshitz transition, can leads to the emergence of fascinating phenomena like colossal magnetoresistance and superconductivity. While Lifshitz transitions have been demonstrated for a broad range of materials using equilibrium tuning of macroscopic parameters like strain, doping, pressure, and temperature, a nonequilibrium route toward ultrafast and transient switching of the Fermi surface topology has not been demonstratedyet. Using time-resolved multidimensional photoemission spectroscopy combined with TDDFT+U simulations, we demonstrate a scheme based on ultrafast laser-driven band renormalization that drives a Lifshitz transition in the topological type-II Weyl semimetal Td-MoTe2, due to transient modification of effective electron-electron interactions. [more]
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