To increase the visibility of our scientific publications and the people behind them, we accompany selected publications by so called ‘Publication Spotlights’. These consist of a short summary of the paper for a broader audience and usually photos from the lab and/or a portrait photo of the (main) author(s).
As we may remember from school, an atom consists of a nucleus and a certain amount of electrons in the atomic shell. Similar to marbles running down the marble run or apples falling from trees, these electrons strive for lowering their potential energy.
What is the perfect mirror? From a physical point of view, it is a device that reflects any incoming light without loss. Everyday materials that are e.g. found in your bathroom are far away from that benchmark. But even high quality optics for lab applications don’t do the job completely.
Electron microscopes allow an unmatched insight into smallest structures. Regarding the image resolution, they outcompete light microscopes by a factor of more than 1000. They do so by using a beam of electrons instead of light rays to probe the samples.
The heaviest part of a high-end camera is the objective, made from heavy glass. In today’s smartphone camera, you find mini versions of the same, with drastically reduced weight and consumption of space. But this is nothing compared to so-called flat optics, a cutting-edge research field in photonics.
Theoretical physics aims at describing observable phenomena and predicting possible effects using a huge mathematical toolbox. A powerful approach is considering the system as a so-called Hermitian system. This theoretical approach results in observable numbers like the position, the momentum or energy values that can be measured in real-world experiments.
Clapping your hands generates sound. At concerts and in big stadiums, even huge crowds easily synchronize their applause to a repetitive timed beat. Their clapping is coherent. Single excited atoms can also show coherence.
If you read the term ‚color center’, you may not necessarily think of quantum physics. Color centers are tiny defects in an otherwise perfectly built crystal. What at first sounds like a disadvantage is in fact a highly promising pathway for modern quantum technologies.
Stefan Richter published on “Imaging Trapped Ion Structures via Fluorescence Cross-Correlation Detection”. This highly sensitive technique yields structural information of the arrangement of single photon sources where direct imaging techniques fail. Examples of single photon sources are color cente...
