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My research career:

I finished my diploma in December 1998. My diploma work was about Stimulated Raman Scattering in molecular crystals. In this 6 months project i produced two very efficient SRS-crystals. These two crystals were NaBrO₃ and Na₂SO₄. You can download two rapid research notes, which I wrote in collaboration with J. Findeisen as a pdf file on the homepage of "Physica status solidi".

In March 1999 I started my PhD thesis and succeeded "ignite cum laude" at the end of April 2003. My work was a part of research which enjoyed a growing interest of many chemists and physicists. One aim of this research is to increase the density of information storage of computer devices since the common technique will come to physically limited capacities. One way to overcome this limitation is to reduce the unit of information storage to one single molecule. Such molecules are built up by molecular building blocks which are connected by linkers. The chemists try to find combinations of molecular building blocks and linkers such that the products show magnetic behavior that is suitable for possible devices for information storage. The smallest unit for such a device is a molecule and they are therefore called Single Molecule Magnets (SMM's).

I was examining the chemical and physical behavior of the combination of the building block Nb^IV(CN)₈ with different linkers and a cubic Prussian blue analog contaning Mn^II and Mn^III. The compounds I obtained showed suitable magnetic behavior but only at very low temperatures (below 50 Kelvin). Furthermore the compounds haven't been molecules but 3-dimensional network compounds built up by the corresponding molecular units. The next step would be to modulate the compounds in such a way that the ordering temperature could be raised to ambient temperatures and to obtain finite units like molecules instead of infinite network compounds.

You can have a look at the team in which I'm working here.