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Professor Manfred Bayer of TU Dortmund University has been appointed as a joint professor of the University Alliance Ruhr (UA Ruhr): The physicist will work closely together with researchers at Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) and the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE).
As UA Ruhr professor, Manfred Bayer will examine new types of materials with the help of laser spectroscopy and act as an interface within the alliance between physics, chemistry and materials science: This collaboration should enhance scientists’ understanding of what are known as 2D materials, which are composed of just a single atomic layer, and boost the further development of such materials. The objective in particular is to combine different 2D materials, such as semiconducting systems with superconducting or ferromagnetic ones, so that they reciprocally influence each other. In this way, it will be possible in future to manufacture inexpensive components with low energy consumption that are also environmentally sound.
The Mercator Research Center Ruhr (MERCUR) is supporting the new UA Ruhr professorship with around € 1 million – and thus also fostering the complementary strengths that the researchers at the three universities are contributing to their joint work: For example, UDE will produce the materials and analyze them on nanometer scale; a new manufacturing process is currently being developed for this in Bochum. Both universities are also using a wide range of computing methods for the theoretical description of the materials, while the physicists in Bayer’s working group in Dortmund are primarily engaged in their optical examination with the help of advanced spectroscopy.
Vita
Professor Manfred Bayer has been professor for experimental physics at TU Dortmund University since 2002. His special field is spectroscopy of condensed matter. Since 2015 he has been spokesperson for the German-Russian Collaborative Research Center/Transregio 160 “Coherent Manipulation of Interacting Spin Excitations in Tailored Semiconductors” and since 2014 spokesperson at TU Dortmund University for CRC/TTR 142 “Tailored Non-linear Photonics”. He brings with him an international network, from which all the institutions involved will profit.
About the UA Ruhr professorships
Manfred Bayer’s appointment is the sixth joint Ruhr professorship. The first was that of physicist Professor Claus M. Schneider, UDE, in 2010. He was followed by genome informatics expert Professor Sven Rahmann from UDE in 2013 and chemist Professor Martina Havenith from RUB together with Professor Petra Wiederkehr from Dortmund, a specialist in engineering informatics, in 2017. In 2018, chemist Professor Malte Behrens, UDE, was appointed to a UA Ruhr professorship. The UA Ruhr professorship has been sponsored by MERCUR since 2103.
About the University Alliance Ruhr
Under the motto “Better Together”, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, TU Dortmund University and the University of Duisburg-Essen have joined together to form the University Alliance Ruhr (UA Ruhr). Since 2007, the three major universities in the Ruhr region have been pooling their expertise and thus strengthening their capabilities.
The statistics of the UA Ruhr give an impression of the shared diversity and strength: more than 120,000 young people study, conduct research and work together in a network encompassing a subject spectrum ranging from engineering and natural sciences to the humanities, social sciences and medicine. The UA Ruhr thus makes the Ruhr region one of the strongest science locations in Germany.