Intro

While 2019 was largely unaffected by the coronavirus, the pandemic soon became the defining aspect of 2020. The research that has been conducted under pandemic conditions is vastly different from that carried out in the past.

Nonetheless, this research report clearly demonstrates that the scientists of the Faculty of Physics were able to work on a wide range of very interesting topics in the past year. Professor Heiko Wende and his team are exploring ways of solving the problem of heat generation in microelectronics, for instance. Professor Axel Lorke’s research group seeks to trace the movement of a single electron within an electronic component. Professor Marika Schleberger‘s group grapples with the question of whether it is feasible to develop a graphene-based pressure sensor that can detect gases with the highest possible precision. The team around Professor Michael Schreckenberg studies communication between automated and non-automated road users and the question of whether it can improve the efficiency and safety of road traffic.

Major milestones of the past two years included the Faculty's participation in the newly established DFG Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio CRC/TRR 270 ‘Hysteresis Design of Magnetic Materials for Efficient Energy Conversion’ in 2019 and the extension of CRC 1242 ‘Non-Equilibrium Dynamics of Condensed Matter in the Time Domain’.