Dr. rer. nat. Philippe Wernet

The physicist works as a project and group leader at the electron storage ring BESSY II at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin

Philippe Wernet was born in 1971 in Strasbourg (France) and grew up in Freiburg. He studied physics at the Technical University of Berlin, in Lyon (France) and at the University of Hamburg.

Since his Diplom and PhD work at the Hamburger Synchrotronstrahlungslabor HASYLAB at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY (PhD in 2000) he has been using x-ray methods at various synchrotron radiation facilities in Germany and in the USA. He is primarily interested in the investigation of the electronic and geometric structures of matter in areas at the border between physics and chemistry. It is in particular his investigations on the structure of water in its liquid, gaseous, solid and supercritical states which he started during his post doc in 2001 and 2002 in Stanford (USA) at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) which are well respected.

Since 2003 Philippe Wernet has been a project and group leader at the electron storage ring BESSY II at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin. He is also giving lectures at the Technical University of Berlin and is planning his habilitation.

His research focus

In the focus of his current research are investigations in chemical physics and time-resolved studies in ultrafast x-ray science. He has been using for this in the past years the unique opportunities in Adlershof and in particular the proximity of the electron storage ring BESSY II and the Max-Born-Institut für nichtlineare Optik und Kurzzeitspektroskopie.

In collaboration with different groups there he set up sources for ultrashort x-ray pulses and developed and applied time-resolved x-ray methods. The recent exploitation of this progressive field is enabled by highly brilliant x-ray sources such as BESSY II and state-of-the-art laser technology.

Philippe Wernet is using so called pump-probe techniques: Laser pulses with a duration of several 10 femtoseconds (10^-12 s) are used to excite the sample and spectroscopic tools with ultrashort x-ray pulses are applied to interrogate its state after a well-defined and controllable time delay. By repeating the measurement for various time delays a movie of the evolution of the sample can be recorded in this way.

Philippe Wernet is currently using this approach to investigate the ultrafast dynamics of the electronic and geometric structures of molecules. Studying the interplay of nuclear and electron dynamics allows for an unprecedented insight into chemical reactions in real time.

Philippe Wernet and his co-workers and colleagues recently succeeded for the first time to combine ultrafast infrared and time-resolved x-ray spectroscopy to study the structural dynamics in liquid water.

Contact: Philippe Wernet, wernet(at)helmholtz-berlin.de, tel. +49 30 / 6392-3448, www.helmholtz-berlin.de