Ultrafast Solid State Spectroscopy

Research Group Leader

Stefan Kaiser

Stefan is the head of the independent Ultrafast Solid-State-Spectroscopy Group of the Max-Planck Institute for Solid State Research and he is Professor at the TU Dresden.

PostDocs

Hao is a postdoc within the Max-Planck-UBC-UTokyo center. He is working on ultrafast probes on correlated quantum materials. Therefore he uses the joined expertise of the center on excitation schemes ranging from THz and MIR frequencies up to the VIS. Hao will combine broadband optical probes and time-resolved ARPES experiments to characterize transient states of matter with particular focus on the collective coherent responses of the driven states.

PhD-students

Liwen Feng

Liwen works in a joint IQST project (together with the 3rd Physics Institute, U Stuttgart) on probing magnetisation dynamics using diamond NV centers.

Min-Jae Kim

Min-Jae studies optical control of superconductivity via optical stimulations. In particular she is interested in the collective Higgs response of the condensate.

Parmida Shabestari

Parmida develops nonlinear optical and vibrational excitations to control and probe properties of novel quantum materials. Also using nearfield optics, coupling these optical probes with the resolution of an atomic force microscope, allows her to access the equilibrium and transient optical properties of the light-driven states down to the nanoscale with subwavelength resolution.

Master-Students

Kedar Honasoge

Kedar probes the symmetry change in the non-linear optical prooperties of complex materials across phase transitions.

Students

Le Phuong Hoang

Phuong studied Materials Science and Engineering at KAIST in Daejeon, South Korea and performed his bachelor thesis on "focus determination system for high precision laser processing". In addition, he did several other research projects in applications of high power lasers and optical materials. Now he has joined the Ultrafast Solid State Spectroscopy group at Max Planck for his research internship and entered the University of Stuttgart as an International Master student in Physics.

David Hoffmann

David works on near field optical microscopy.

Tim Priessnitz

Tim works on THz spectroscopy on nanostructures superconductors

Sydney Seraphim

Sydney is an COOP student from UBC Vancouver working on time domain THz spectroscopy.

Former Members

Gelon Albrecht

Gelon was a PhD student with research focus on the nonlinear optical properties of hybrid plasmonic-organic systems in the visible and near infrared. He performed a comprehensive study of protected and bare plasmonic materials and tested their properties for high field applications and refractory plasmonics.

Steinn Ymir Agustsson

Master thesis on Extreme Time-Scale Dynamics in Excitonic Insulators.

Desislava (Dessy) Daskalova

Dessy explores the near field optical properties of temperture and current driven phase transitions.

Amrit Raj Pokharel

Master thesis on probing near-field optical properties in an excitonic insulator.

Divya Virmani

Master thesis on Near-field Optical Mapping of Surface Plasmon Polaritons.

Daniel Werdehausen

Master thesis on Non-equilibrium Higgs-Phonon Coupling in Excitonic Insulators

Niklas Metz

Bachelor thesis on white light generation using non-linear optical fibres.

Anita Mahinpei

Anita was an undergraduate student at the University of British Columbia in Canada, majoring in Physics and Computer Science. For her first internship, she worked with the UBC ATLAS group on improving the neural network used for identifying top quark jets from QCD jets using the four-vectors of the jet components. She had joined the Ultrafast Solid State Spectroscopy group at Max Planck for her second internship project and developed a fast scan setup for pump-probe measurements.