Dr. Raphael Jay has received the Carl-Ramsauer-Award for his excellent dissertation

The physicist studied ultrafast charge transfer dynamics in iron complexes

Dr. Raphael Jay has received this year's Carl-Ramsauer-Prize of the German Physical Society of Berlin (DPGzB). The prize honours outstanding dissertations in physics and related fields and will be awarded during a festive colloquium on 18 November 2020 in the Magnus-Haus.

Dr. Raphael Jay studied ultrafast charge transfer dynamics in iron complexes during his doctorate at the University of Potsdam under the supervision of Prof. Alexander Föhlisch. In the context of the EDAX project at BESSY II, he carried out measurements with ultra-short X-ray pulses, whereby the experimental infrastructure was also used for measurements at the Free Electron Laser LCLS in Stanford.

The complex measurement results were analysed within the HZB Virtual Institute “Dynamic Pathways in multimensional Landscapes” in collaboration with Stockholm University. In future, this type of experiment will also be possible at the European XFEL in Hamburg, which was developed in parallel within the EDAX project. Raphael Jay is now continuing his scientific work at the University of Uppsala.

Results of Jay's thesis have been published for instance in Angewandte Chemie, international Edition (2019):
Covalency-driven preservation of local charge densities in a metal-to-ligand charge-transfer excited iron photosensitizer
Raphael M. Jay, Sebastian Eckert, Vinícius Vaz da Cruz, Mattis Fondell, Rolf Mitzner, and Alexander Föhlisch
DOI: 10.1002/anie.201904761

Press release HZB, 29 September 2020