Annual Report 2014 - Institute of Ion Beam Physics and Materials Research

This past year 2014 was the year when we finally completely arrived as a “full member” in the Helmholtz Association. This is related to the successfully passed research evaluation in the framework of the Program Oriented Funding (POF), which will give us a stable and predictable funding for the next five years (2015 – 2019). This is particularly true for our large-scale user facilities, like the Ion Beam Center (IBC) and the electron accelerator ELBE with the free-electron laser. Most of our activities are assigned to the program “From Matter to Materials and Life” within the research area “Matter”, in cooperation with several other German Helmholtz Centers. Our in-house research is performed in three so-called research themes, as depicted in the schematic below. What is missing there for simplicity is a small part of our activities in the program “Nuclear Waste Management and Safety” within the research area “Energy”. Our research and facilities were well appreciated by the evaluation committee, who made the following judgement about the Ion Beam Center: “The Ion Beam Centre (IBC) of HZDR is an internationally leading ion-beam facility (with ion energies ranging from several eV to several tens of MeV). At both the national and international level it is one of the key players and is unique in its kind. The synergy between forefront research and user service has been leading to a very good publication output for both in-house research and user research. … The very broad range of beam energies, the versatility of techniques and applications – both for ion beam modification of materials and for ion-beam analysis – makes the IBC unique in its kind. … The strength of IBC is that its activities are based on a combination of forefront research and user service, which mutually interact in synergy and strengthen one another. In turn, this synergy has been leading to a very good publication output for both in-house research and user research.” In order to make our Annual Report a bit more compact, we have decided to include only four full journal papers this year. This was also triggered by the fact that our publication activities have turned out be become more diverse, in more diverse journals than in the past, and often through longer papers, which would be too long to reprint them here. However, apart from the constantly quantitatively high publication output, we succeeded to publish in excellent journals such as Nature Physics, Nano Letters and Physical Review Letters, in fields as diverse as ion beam physics, magnetism and terahertz spectroscopy. Two of our scientists, Dr. Artur Erbe and Dr. Alexej Pashkin obtained their Habilitation in 2014, both at University of Konstanz. For the first time, we are hosting an Emmy Noether Young Investigator Group funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG); the group works on the hot topic of magnonics and is headed by Dr. Helmut Schultheiß. Finally we would like to cordially thank all partners, friends, and organizations who supported our progress in 2014. Special thanks are due to the Executive Board of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, the Minister of Science and Arts of the Free State of Saxony, and the Minister of Education and Research of the Federal Government of Germany. Numerous partners from universities, industry and research institutes all around the world contributed essentially, and play a crucial role for the further development of the institute. Last but not least, the directors would like to thank again all IIM staff for their efforts and excellent contributions in 2014