2024

We welcome Alicja Karpinska as a new PhD student in our group. She will be working on dynamics connected with order-disorder vs. displacive effects in condensed matter systems. Her goal is to use time-resolved x-ray diffraction and absorption spectroscopy to look at long- and short-range order dynamics to identify the length scale of order parameters through a phase transition.

We welcome Lukas Heckendorn as a new PhD student in our group. He will be working on developing an experimental method to quantitatively determine the transition type of the structural phase transition in a general crystalline material. Specifically, he will investigate the ultrafast dynamics of the short-range and the long-range order in Germanium Telluride and other crystalline materials undergoing a structural phase transition by using optical and x-ray probes.

Materials with linear electronic dispersion often feature high carrier mobilities and unusually strong nonlinear optical interactions. In the work, Davide investigated the (THz) nonlinear dynamics of one such material HgCdTe and demonstrated the sensitivity of the nonlinear optical properties to small changes in the electronic dispersion. The article has just been published in Physical Review B, with the following link: https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.110.094303

After working with us for 3 years as a Postdoc, Davide leaves the group. Among collaborating on many different projects, he successfully designed and realised a time-resolved magneto-optical setup working in the mid-IR range. His main focus was centered on investigating ferroic and topological materials in the long wavelengths limit. We thank him for his work and wish him a lot of success in his further career.

We congratulate Vladimir Ovuka on the successfull defense of his Doctoral thesis. He presented achievements on his work on "Toward ferroelectric order control in Germanium Telluride". We wish him all the best for his future career.