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Physicist Dr. Bärbel Rethfeld of the University of Kaiserslautern receives from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) a Heisenberg Professorship for Applied Theoretical Physics. The research of Bärbel Rethfeld deals with the computer simulation of physical processes in material processing with laser beams. Her special field of expertise is the development of new models in order to describe or predict the ultrafast behavior of electrons in such processes.
Bärbel Rethfeld is one of a handful of physicists within Germany that have been awarded a Heisenberg professorship, in Rhineland-Palatinate she even is the first female scientist at all holding this distinguished professorship. Overall, four of these professorships funded by the German Research Foundation went to Rhineland-Palatinate, so far, three of these were awarded to young scientists in Kaiserslautern.
With the program named after the German physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Karl Heisenberg the German Research Foundation supports outstanding young scientists. As part of the application process for a Heisenberg professorship, young scientists choose the university where they want to establish their research field. The host institution, on the other hand, has to agree that the additional professorship reflects a novel scientific priority of the university.
The president of the University of Kaiserslautern, Prof. Dr. Helmut J. Schmidt, sees this new professorship as, yet, another recognition of the successful promotion of young scientists at the University of Kaiserslautern. He pointed out: "The fact that already the third Heisenberg professorship in Rhineland-Palatinate is awarded to a researcher at the University of Kaiserslautern is also a tribute to the excellent environment at our university. This professorship, nevertheless, is primarily a personal success of Dr. Rethfeld, the appointment shows that she belongs to the scientific elite of our country."
Since May 2007, Dr. Bärbel Rethfeld is the head of the Emmy Noether junior research group for ultrafast dynamics of laser-excited solid-state physics in the department of physics at the University of Kaiserslautern. The research group of the 41-year-old scientist and mother of two children comprises seven members, one postdoc, four PhD students and two graduate students, and works on unbelievably fast physical processes:
A blink lasts barely a tenth of a second, the flapping of an insect’s wing a three-hundredth of a second, but the time frames that are of interest for Bärbel Rethfeld are in the femtosecond range, the quadrillionth part of a second. For example, upon irradiation of transparent material with a high-intensity laser pulse of a few femtoseconds of duration, a cascade of processes is triggered that leads to permanent material modifications or even to material removal. This process is used in laser correction of visual deficiency, which is enjoying increasing popularity.
Bärbel Rethfeld provides tools to describe the physical processes all the way from energy absorption, over melting of solids up to material removal. She is particulary interested in the very early processes, where a large number of electrons are excited far beyond the thermodynamic equilibrium. In order to describe the behavior of these electrons and the further energy distribution, completely novel models are needed that are developed by the Rethfeld group. In addition, she works as one of the few groups in theoretical physics in a project for basic research on large scale intrumentation funded by the Bundesminsterium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF, Federal Ministry for Education and Research,) in order to analyse and understand novel experiments with X-ray lasers.
Bärbel Rethfeld is a member of the state research center OPTIMAS at the TU Kaiserslautern and is part of the cluster of excellence "Kaiserslautern Center for Advanced Engineering Spin – CASE", which is in the final phase of the evaluation within the excellence initiative by the German federal and state governments.
Dr. Bärbel Rethfeld (Foto: de Sousa).
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Dr. Bärbel Rethfeld (Foto: de Sousa).
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