Institute – link

The WWU Münster is one of the largest research universities in Germany and hosts one of the largest departments of physics in Germany with over 3,000 students. WWU is part of the German U15 universities and ranked consistently one of the top research institutions in the country.

The University of Münster is home to ten Leibniz Prize winners. The University’s excellent research quality is further underscored by seventeen ERC Grants (Starting, Consolidator and Advanced) and six Max Planck Research Awards.

A particular focus area at WWU are the nanosciences and nanotechnology. In the last 5 years significant investments and new buildings have been procured to strengthen nanoscale research, including one of the first nanotechnology institutes in Germany, the Center for NanoTechnology (CeNTech), the battery research institute MEET and the new Center for Soft Nanoscience (SoN), to be completed 2017. These independent facilities foster primarily interdisciplinary research.

Physics in Münster focusses its activities on five innovative areas of actual top level research in ten experimentally and theoretically oriented institutes, covering nanophysics, applied physics, non-linear physics, nuclear physics and geo-physics. In the Physics Institute (PI) 12 research groups in theory and experiment focus on nanophysics and surface science. More than 140 graduate students are currently hosted by the PI.

The group of Prof Dr Wolfram Pernice (W. Pernice) within the Physics Institute is concerned with the investigation of responsive nanosystems and photonic circuits. A particular strength of the group are tunable and hybrid photonic devices, including waveguide integrated phase change material components. The group has also pioneered the fabrication and characterization of nanophotonic waveguide based single photon counters and their integration into quantum photonic devices. Through high-resolution lithography advanced functional photonic circuits are routinely fabricated in a wide range of materials with broad applicability, with emphasis on scalability and large area coverage. In particular hybrid approaches for integrating unconventional functional elements into otherwise passive devices are developed. These include optomechanical circuits, carbon-nanotube based photonic components as well as diamond nanophotonic systems. Various approaches for reconfigurable and tunable nanophotonic systems are developed in the group.

People – link

  • Prof. Wolfram H. P. Pernice is a full professor of Physics at WWU since 2015. He is deputy director of the Physics Institute (PI) and managing director of the Münster Nanofabrication Facility (MNF). Prior to joining WWU he lead an independent research group at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), funded through the prestigious Emmy-Noether Programm of the German Science foundation (DFG). W. Pernice carried out postdoctoral work on Optomechanics and Quantum Photonics at Yale University, supported by a Feodor-Lynen Fellowship of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation. He received his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2007 and a Diplom in Microsystems Engineering from the University of Freiburg in 2004. W. Pernice was awarded an ERC Consolidator grant in 2016. He is a member of the German Young Academy of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Within the Fun-COMP consortium Prof. Pernice holds long-standing collaborations with C.D. Wright at Exeter at H. Bhaskaran at Oxford.
  • A PhD student Anna Ovvyan will also participate in waveguide fabrication and design in the project. A. Ovvyan also joined WWU in 2016 and is funded through the Erasmus Mundus PhD program. She is very experienced in nanofabrication and will be responsible for e-beam lithography at WWU.
  • In addition, Ms. Lin Jin  will take up PhD studies at WWU in October 2017 and support the project. She graduated from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, also with a prestigious fellowship by the Erasmus Mundus program. Ms. Jin holds a first class degree from East China University of Science and Technology (ECUST) and is currently working in the research group of W. Pernice on phase-change photonics
  • Johannes Feldmann obtained his PhD and carried out post-doc work withing the Fun-COMP project, focusing particularly on the key project developments of the Fun-COMP (and the first ever) phase-change spiking photonic neuromorphic chip and the development of the Fun-COMP photonic tensor processor.
  • Frank Brückerhoff-Plückelmann is another key WWU based researcher working on the Fun-COMP project, developing new on-chip input/output multiplexing circuits as well as improved arithmetic processing units