Freigeist Fellowship

The physicist Prof. Dr. Daria Gorelova studies in her project “Seeing excitons in motion” characterization possibilities of exciton dynamics with special x-ray light that can be generated by free-electron lasers, such as European XFEL in Hamburg.

Excitons are quasi-particles that describe a special state of electrons and are crucial for the photovoltaic effect as used by solar cells

She uses quantum-mechanical methods to investigate how ultrafast light pulses can measure excitonic motion on atomic scale.

The microscopic phenomena that Prof. Dr. Daria Gorelova studies can open up new prospectives for the field of renewable energies.

German article by the MIN Faculty about the project >

Article by DESY about the project >

In his research project "Super-Resolution Fluorescence Cryo-Microscopy", Prof. Dr. Rainer Kaufmann develops a new microscopy method for examining biological specimens.

The new microscopy method combines super-resolution fluorescence microscopy with cryo-immobilisation (flash-freezing) of biological structures.

Through freezing, changes in the sample during the sample preparation can be avoided and the actual original state of the biological specimens can be viewed.

In order to be able to visualise these frozen samples optically, Prof. Dr. Kaufmann is developing a new super-resolution fluorescence microscope particularly for cryo-microscopy.

More information about the project and the group of Prof. Dr. Kaufmann: https://uhh.de/cryofm >