MBI Staff Member – Personal info
Dr. Michael Woerner
michael.woerner(at)mbi-berlin.de
+49 30 6392 1470
C3: Femtosecond Spectroscopy of Solids
Building C, 1.2
Position
- Head of Department C3 "Femtosecond Spectroscopy on Solids"
- Coordinator of Project 3.2 "Solids and Nanostructures: Electrons, Spins, and Phonons"
- Coordinator of Project 3.3 "Transient Structures and Imaging with X-rays"
Research
I am interested in ultrafast and nonlinear phenomena in condensed matter, in particular organic and inorganic solids and nanostructures. To this end, I generate and apply ultrashort pulses in a wide spectral range (THz to hard x-ray) to measure the nonequilibrium dynamics of elementary excitations in solids and the ultrafast structural dynamics of crystalline material. Most recent activities are two-dimensional spectroscopy in the THz frequency range (Figure: two phonon coherences in InSb) and femtosecond x-ray absorption experiments using table top high harmonic sources.
Curriculum vitae
1981-1988 Study of physics at the Technical University (TU) of Munich
1988-1991 PhD Work at TU Munich, Physics Department E11 (Prof. W. Kaiser)
1991 Graduation (Dr. rer. nat.) at the TU
1991-1993 Postdoctoral Researcher at the Physics Department E11, TU Munich
1993-1996 Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max-Born-Institute, Berlin
1997 Postdoctoral Researcher at Bell Laboratories (Lucent), Holmdel, NJ, USA
since 1997 Department head of C3 at the Max-Born-Institute, Berlin
1999 Habilitation at the Humboldt University Berlin
Recent highlight(s)
Electric polarization in the macroscopic world and electrons moving at atomic scales
Wiggling atoms switch the electric polarization of crystals
Quantum Swing - a pendulum that moves forward and backwards at the same time
Amplification of Sound Waves at Extreme Frequencies
Hot means slow: Electron plasma oscillations tuned down with light
The longer the better: Optical long-wavelength pulses generate brilliant ultrashort hard x-ray flashes
MBI Publications
- Recent advances in ultrafast X-ray sources Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series A-Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences 377 (2019) 20180384/1-37
- Impact of piezoelectric fields on coherent zone-folded phonons in GaAs/AlAs superlattices Physical Review B 100 (2019) 121302(R)/1-6
- Resonant second-order nonlinear terahertz response of gallium arsenide Physical Review Letters 121 (2018) 266602/1-6
- Multidimensional terahertz spectroscopy Encyclopedia of Modern Optics, 2nd ed., vol. 2 Elsevier (2018) 197-206
- Ultrafast carrier dynamics in a GaN/Al0.18 Ga0.82 N superlattice Physical Review B 97 (2018) 161303/1-5
- Macroscopic electric polarization and microscopic electron dynamics: Quantitative insight from femtosecond x-ray diffraction Physical Review B 98 (2018) 054306/1-12
- Soft-mode driven polarity reversal in ferroelectrics mapped by ultrafast x-ray diffraction Structural Dynamics 5 (2018) 024501/1-11
- Water librations in the hydration shell of phospholipids Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters 8 (2017) 4492-4497
- Strong local-field enhancement of the nonlinear soft-mode response in a molecular crystal Physical Review Letters 119 (2017) 097404/1-6
- Nonlinear terahertz spectroscopy on multilayer graphene Optical Properties of Graphene World Scientific (2017) 269-294