Manuel Längle next to a bust of Boltzmann with a Christmas hat

Celebrating Outstanding Students at the Faculty

The Hans Thirring prize and the Dean’s List are given each year during the Christmas Faculty Meeting to excellent students. They provide an opportunity for the entire Faculty community to appreciate the great work done by one of its most important members, our students. 

For the second year in a row, the Hans Thirring prize has been awarded to two dissertations and not only one. It has not been the first award for Thomas Mieling’s thesis “Gupta–Bleuler Quantization of the Electromagnetic Field in Curved Space-Times with Applications to Gravitational Photon Interferometry”. He also won the prestigious “Award of Excellence” from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF). You can read more about it on this press release. The other awardee was Manuel Längle (whose picture illustrates this post) for his thesis “Low energy irradiation on 2D materials – from single defects to few-atom noble gas cluster”. During his PhD, Manuel used low energy ion irradiation to manipulate 2D materials such as hBN and graphene mono- and multilayers. He studied the resulting defects in materials, how these defects can be used for doping and also how to trap noble gases between multiple layers of graphene where they condense at room temperature. His results were published in Nature Materials and you can learn more about his research here.

Master students from the three Master programs offered at the faculty: Physics, Computational Physics and Lehramt (Teaching Accreditation) who have had excellent academic results during his studies and from their theses are awarded a place at the Dean’s List. These are the 2023/24 winners:

NameThesisSupervisor(s)
Felix Maximilian ALBRECHTMeasurement of ion residence times in the ILIAMS cooler with a new multi-beam switcherRobin Golser & Martin Martschini
Philip Allen BLAIRThermophoresis of anisotropic colloidal particlesRoberto Cerbino
Chloé Marjorie BÛCHERONStopping criterion for disease module detection on protein-protein interaction networksJörg Menche
Florian FECHTELRotational cooling of non-spherical particlesMarkus Arndt
Richard FERSTLOptical diffraction mechanisms for molecules at DUV light gratingsMarkus Arndt
Sebastian FORSTNERNeural-network versus kernel-based force fieldsGeorg Kresse
Marcel GASSERExploiting spin orbit torque for magnetic field sensingDieter Süss
Hannah JUNGREUTHMAYERCustomized source-detector trajectory optimization for CBCT using Simulated Annealing algorithmChristoph Dellago
Clara KOFLERMeasuring the interlayer distance of twisted bilayer graphene using interferometric 4D-STEMJani Kotakoski
Jakob David NEUHAUSERSimulating arbitrary floating point numbersWilfried Gansterer
Barbara PLATZERAnalysing supported lipid bilayer dynamics with interferometric scattering microscopy and fluorescence imagingThomas Juffmann
Gudrun PÖTZELBERGERFirst principles simulation of ion implantation into grapheneToma Susi & Alexander Markevich
Milán Ádám ROZMÁNBounding spectral gaps in the matrix product state formalismNorbert Schuch & András Molnár
Violetta SCHAAFNetwork-based analysis of the functional convergence of disease-associated gene setsJörg Menche
David ZEHNERIntegrating molecular dynamics and micromagnetics for the investigation of nanoparticles in liquid carriersDieter Süss
Sebastian ZEILINGERSpin orbit Torque enabled magnetic sensor with low offset and tunable sensitivityDieter Süss

We wish all the awardees all the best!