News

Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz will continue to be supported by the Research Initiative of the state as finalized by the signing the research initiative's target agreement with the Rhineland-Palatinate Ministry of Science and Health (MWG) on 6 May 2024.

As part of the continuing effort to focus on the most promising research activities, TopDyn has been chosen as one of 6 Top-Level Research Areas that will be funded until 2028.
The JGU Top-Level Research Areas have been identified as they bring together internationally established working groups that have already produced excellent results.

More information: https://presse.uni-mainz.de/johannes-gutenberg-universitaet-mainz-schaerft-forschungsprofil-weiter/

The Excellence Project TopDyn calls for research proposals to explore new research
directions that prepare future coordinated research programs.

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The Transregional Collaborative Research Center “Spin+X – spin in its collective environment” was first approved in 2016. It is currently in its second funding period and the third funding period will start in January 2024.

A research team of physicists and chemists from RPTU Kaiserlautern and JGU Mainz is working on fundamental spin phenomena. As in the first eight years, the work will focus on spin research and its potential for information and communiction technology. In addition to ferromagnets and antiferromagnets, a future focus will be on altermagnet based systems - new types of magnets that combine the best properties of ferromagnets and antiferromagnets. Findings from spin research are already being incorporated into the development of new technologies such as magnetic memory chips, logic and sensors.

TopDyn congratulates Dr. Libor Šmejkal on winning the "Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year 2023" award in the field of Natural Sciences.

Dr. Libor Šmejkal is a research team leader in the ISPIRE group at the Institute of Physics, JGU Mainz, and an associate researcher at the Insitute of Physics, Czech Academy of Sciences.

He is currently receiving Early Career Researcher Excellence Support from TopDyn for his project: " Altermagnetic spin exchange, excitations and dynamics (ALTERSEED)".

Dr Shane Kelly and J-Prof. Dr. J. Marino have recently published two articles (one on PRL and one on SciPost) on hybrid quantum circuits, which have received support from TopDyn over the last two years. The works aim at proposing new quantum error correction strategies in hybrid classical-quantum algorithms that are the research frontier in many body quantum information in the NISQ era. The two works features prestigious collaborations with the University of Berkeley and the KITP in Santa Barbara, California.

In one of the articles the NEUQUAM team have joined efforts with the trapped ions lab in Mainz (Dr. Poschinger and Prof. Dr. Schmidt-Kaler), re-creating a long missing link between theory and experiments in the area of quantum many body info in Mainz.

Orbitronics is an emerging field of research dealing with manipulation of the orbital degree of freedom of electrons for quantum information technology. However, unambiguously detecting ultrafast dynamics of orbital angular momentum has been challenging so far. By using state-of-the-art THz spectroscopy and theoretical calculations, scientists from Freie Universität Berlin and University of Mainz, together with collaborators, clarified ultrafast and long-range flow of orbitally polarized electron for the first time. The research is published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Publication:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-023-01470-8

We are very pleased to welcome PD Dr. Timo Kuschel as our new Lecturer and Scientific Coordinator to the TopDyn-Team.

We are looking forward to a successful cooperation.

We congratulate Dr. Benjamin Stadtmüller for his new position as Professor for Ultrafast Phenomena at Surfaces at RPTU and thank him for his great commitment as scientific coordinator of the TopDyn project and the good cooperation during the last 2 years.
We wish him all the best for the future and look forward to his contributions to TopDyn in the future!

We are very pleased to welcome Ambika Kapoor to the TopDyn-Team. She joins us as Hiwi in the area of public relations. We are looking forward to a successful cooperation.

Olena Fedchenko works as a PostDoc in the group of Prof. Elmers (KOMET335) within the DFG CRC/TRR288 Elasto-Q-Mat, project B04 "Momentum microscopy of highly correlated systems under strain".  Her research focuses on the development and implementation of a novel type of photoemission detector system, namely a time-of-flight momentum microscope. With this new tool at head, she aims to study the electronic and geometrical structure of complex materials with exotic electronic properties, such as TMDCs, Kagome systems, Eu-based 122 compounds, altermagnets, etc.

The preliminary work leading to the successful application for the DFG grant was carried out within the framework of Dr. Fedchenko’s TopDyn Early Career Researcher Excellence Support  project. The topic of this project was "Novel contrast mechanisms in transmission momentum microscopy for the investigation of structure and dynamics of topological materials". Supported by TopDyn, she used this valuable time to gain the necessary knowledge, experience and first experimental results. At the same time, fruitful collaborations were established, which were crucial for her successful application for the DFG research grant.

Dr. Fedchenko recently received a two-year DFG grant for the project "Investigation of the structure and ultrafast dynamics of topological materials with inversion symmetry breaking using transmission momentum microscopy".