Physics

Research at the Faculty of Physics is concerned with processes that are very fast and very slow. For excited electrons, it is often a matter of just 10-14 seconds. Planets are 
a little slower – it takes 1014 seconds for a full-blown planet to be formed out of single atoms. Precisely the experiments that show how large compounds grow out of micrometric particles need to be very fast, since the necessary zero gravity for parabolic flights or experiments in the drop tower lasts only a few seconds. By contrast, using femtosecond spectroscopy to analyse the lifetime of quasiparticles at the interface layer between semi-conductors and metals, it can take 10 hours to obtain enough results for adequate statistics.