The Department of Physics and Astronomy in Heidelberg is pleased to announce the winners of the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Prize, with the support of the company Lab14 in Heidelberg. This year's prizes go to Luca Bischof for his experimental work on "Electron Spin Resonance Studies on the Kitaev Candidate Material Na2Co2TeO6, Triangular GdInO3 and the Canted Antiferromagnet GdCrO3" and to Finn-Leon Temmen, whose Master's thesis is entitled "Exploring the Effective Potential using Normalising Flow-based Density of States".
In his Master's thesis, Luca Bischof focussed on experimental investigations of magnetically frustrated spin systems and examined in particular the properties of the ground state and the low-energy excitations. He dealt with classical frustrated systems as well as with the two-dimensional quantum material Na2Co2TeO6, a Kitaev system near a critical endpoint. The work combines first-class magnetic spectroscopy up to the THz range with excellent data analysis and the further development of the underlying models.
In his work, Finn-Leon combined modern field theory with a machine-learning method: he was able to construct effective field theories on a renormalisation scale systematically by deriving an effective potential. Finn-Leon's work finds application in the quantum field theories underlying particle physics in a very practical way, because the effective potential enables many calculations.
The faculty and Lab14 are delighted to award the prizes to two young, up-and-coming physicists and express their appreciation for the outstanding quality of their work.
FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: FINN_LEON TEMMEN, NORBERT CHRISTLIEB, LUCA BISCHOF
