Two new members join research center
Junior professor Philipp Pirro and private lecturer Axel Pelster were accepted as new members of the state research center in mid-November by the general assembly. The two physicists thus complement the center's research team, whose main focus is research on optics and materials science.
Light - spin - matter. With these research priorities, the OPTIMAS research center was established at the TU Kaiserslautern in 2008. Today, OPTIMAS comprises almost 20 working groups from the departments of physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering / process engineering and electrical and information technology as well as researchers from the affiliated institutes "Institute for Surface and Thin Film Analysis" (IFOS), "Center for Material Characterization and Testing at Fraunhofer ITWM ”,“ Photonics Center Kaiserslautern eV ”(PZKL) and“ Institute for Composite Materials GmbH ”(IVW). At the last general assembly, junior professor Philipp Pirro (group Magnetism) and private lecturer Axel Pelster (group Fundamentals of Solid State and Many-Body Systems) were accepted as the newest members.
The main research area of junior professor Dr. Philipp Pirro is experimental spin dynamics with a focus on the collective self-excitations of the spin system, the spin waves and their quanta, the magnons. The research spectrum includes basic topics such as the topology, chirality and condensation of spin waves as well as application-related research such as the use of magnons for binary and unconventional, neuromorphic logic systems as well as for high-frequency applications such as 5G. He investigates these applications together with industry-related partners such as, e.g., the imec in Belgium, in order to promote the transfer of magnonics into an applicable technology. For experimental characterization of the usually micro- and nanostructured magnonic systems, he mainly uses the inelastic scattering of photons on magnons, the so-called Brillouin light scattering spectroscopy (BLS). These experiments are prepared and evaluated with the help of extensive micromagnetic simulations. In cooperation with other OPTIMAS members, he is also involved in the SFB / TRR 173 Spin+X with the field of THz magnonics and their influence on ultrafast demagnetization processes.
Private lecturer Dr. Axel Pelster is a proven expert in the theoretical description of ultra-cold quantum gases. In the upcoming second funding period of the SFB / TR 185 OSCAR, he theoretically accompanies an experiment on a Bose-Einstein condensate of photons, which is to be established at the TU Kaiserslautern and carried out by OPTIMAS member Prof. Dr. Georg von Freymann with the support of Dr. Frank Vewinger from the University of Bonn. The microstructuring techniques available in Kaiserslautern allow for studying the properties of a photon condensate in the transition from two to one spatial dimension. Furthermore, Axel Pelster investigates within the German-Austrian research group 2247 the physics of quantum gases, in which there is a long-range and anisotropic interaction between magnetic dipolar atoms and electrical dipolar molecules. While in dipolar fermions a deformation of the Fermi sphere to an ellipsoid influences fermionic superfluidity, in dipolar bosons there are quantum droplets, which represent a new phase of matter and can have super-solid properties. In addition to this research, Axel Pelster is particularly involved in the organization of schools and conferences in order to make Kaiserslautern internationally even more visible as a science location.