Stefan Kaiser was appointed to a joint junior professorship between the MPI-FKF and the University of Stuttgart.
Stefan Kaiser will start an "Ultrafast Solid State Spectroscopy" group at the MPI-FKF focusing on optical control and non-equilibrium dynamics in strongly correlated electron systems and novel quantum materials.
Stefan Kaiser received his diploma for "Time Resolved Investigation of Impulsively Excited Phonon-Pair Combination States in Solid States" at the Institute for Semiconductor Electronics of the RWTH Aachen. As a Ph.D. student he joined Martin Dressel's group at the University of Stuttgart. He worked on optical properties of organic conductors and superconductors, especially with focus on the interplay between charge order and superconductivity and was involved in spectroscopy on several other correlated electron materials. In addition Stefan Kaiser performed optics on metamaterials together with Harald Giessen's group at the University of Stuttgart. As post-doc and later as group leader he combined his background on spectroscopy of correlated electron systems and ultrafast technology and joined Andrea Cavalleri at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg. Setting up state-of-the-art time resolved pump-probe experiments in the mid-infrared and THz regime in Hamburg, as well as commissioning and performing pioneering time-resolved ARPES experiments at the ARTEMIS beamline (Central Laser Facility, Rutherford Lab, UK) his research focus quickly moved to quantum many body dynamics in several correlated electron systems. Most prominent are intriguing experiments that explore the possibilities of light induced superconductivity in cuprate high-temperature superconductors even far above Tc.
Now, in Stuttgart, he is aiming to explore the mechanisms behind such fascinating effects of controlling correlated electron materials or superconductivity with light. Therefore his group at the MPI-FKF, and in strong collaboration and affiliation with the 4th Physics Institute, is going to develop new spectroscopic probes and apply novel laser sources seeking for new insights, among them bringing the time resolved techniques to the nano-scale.