Lasers & Sources

ERC awards Wurzburg physicist nearly $1.7M to develop dichalcogenide laser

April 26, 2016

A physicist from JMU Würzburg was funded at a level of nearly $1.7M dollars to develop a dichalcogenide polariton laser.

Gail Overton

Christian Schneider's research could ultimately lead to a novel laser based on transition metal dichalcogenides.

The "unLiMIt2D" project from Christian Schneider, a physicist from the Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg (Bavaria, Germany), was funded at a level of nearly $1.7 million dollars (1.5 million euros) by the European Research Council (ERC) in the form of an ERC Starting Grant. The funding will allow Schneider to add two doctoral students and one postdoc to his team to develop a dichalcogenide-based polariton laser with very low energy consumption.

The material class of transition metal dichalcogenides are made of molybdenum or tungsten, for example, complemented by the elements sulphur, selenium or tellurium, respectively. These materials are interesting for a number of reasons. Reasonably priced, they are relatively easy to prepare in extremely thin and stable layers that consist of a single layer of atoms and have semiconducting properties--making them an ideal material for optoelectronics.

The Würzburg physicists already built a polariton laser in an international project which they presented in "Nature" in 2013. The next years will show whether polariton lasers can also be implemented on the basis of transition metal dichalcogenides.

Christian Schneider is from Karlstadt nearby Würzburg. After graduating from secondary school, he joined the University of Würzburg in 2001 to study nanostructural engineering. He spent one year at the University of Vancouver in Canada as an exchange student. He graduated in 2007 and continued directly with his doctoral thesis in Würzburg: He studied the optical properties of nanostructures and semiconductors which he manufactured in the university's cleanroom at the Chair of Technical Physics. Having received his PhD in 2012, he took charge of the spectroscopy group at the Chair of Technical Physics. The young researcher is networked around the globe and his team cooperates with numerous research groups on four continents.

SOURCE: Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg; https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/sonstiges/meldungen/detail/artikel/erc-grant-fuer-christian-schneider/

About the Author

Gail Overton | Senior Editor (2004-2020)

Gail has more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, product management, and editorial experience in the photonics and optical communications industry. Before joining the staff at Laser Focus World in 2004, she held many product management and product marketing roles in the fiber-optics industry, most notably at Hughes (El Segundo, CA), GTE Labs (Waltham, MA), Corning (Corning, NY), Photon Kinetics (Beaverton, OR), and Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA). During her marketing career, Gail published articles in WDM Solutions and Sensors magazine and traveled internationally to conduct product and sales training. Gail received her BS degree in physics, with an emphasis in optics, from San Diego State University in San Diego, CA in May 1986.