Year: 2018

In future, electronics will be controlled via light waves instead of voltage signals: This is the goal of physicists worldwide. The advantage: Electromagnetic waves of light oscillate at the petahertz frequency. This means that future computers could be a million times faster than the current generation. FAU scientists have now come one step closer to this goal: They have succeeded in precisely controlling electrons in graphene with ultra-short laser pulses.

If you look up at the sky on a clear night you can see stars, lots of stars. Astronomical recordings from observatories let you see them in much greater detail. The Dr. Remeis Observatory in Bamberg, which belongs to Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, owns approximately 40,000 historical photographic plates, a genuine treasure trove for anyone interested in stargazing. Together with Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam and the Universities of Hamburg and Tartu (Estonia), astronomers at FAU have now digitalised roughly 70,000 such glass plates and published them online at www.plate-archive.org.

Physicists at FAU have proven that incoming light causes the electrons in warm perovskites to rotate thus influencing the direction of the flow of electrical current. They have thus found the key to an important characteristic of these crystals, which could play an important role in the development of new solar cells. The results have now been published in the renowned journal ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’.

From July 23 - 26, 2018 the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light is celebrating three important anniversaries in Erlangen optics: 150 years of optics research in Erlangen, the 15th anniversary of the establishment of the Max Planck Research Group for Optics, Information and Photonics (the precursor of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, MPL), and 1.5 years of the inauguration of the new MPL building.

Two letters from Erlangen physics groups have made it into the february issue of the journal Nature Physics. This is extremely exceptional as letter contributions are quite rarely in the highly renowned journal (total number of 6 in this issue). The contribution entitled "Quantum imaging with incohe...