DCF News

On Thursday of this week 23 students visited the MPI-DS to look over the shoulders of our employees. Beside stations in the mechanical workshop and the wind tunnel, the visitors had the opportunity to separate their own DNA experimentally in our department. After the work we served strawberry ice-cream, self-produced quickly by using liquid nitrogen.

The recent article by Peddireddy et al. about self-assembled smectic A liquid crystal fibers, which appeared in Optics Express, has been selected for Research Highlights of Nature Photonics. In this work, we show that in a suitable surfactant suspension, perfectly cylindrical fibers may grow out of droplets of 8CB, a smectic liquid crystal. When doped with Nile Red and optically pumped with a Nd:YAG laser focus, lasing occurs from the optical modes (mostly whispering gallery modes, see image) of the fiber. These systems appear promising for future developments of self-assembling photonic micro-devices.

In this week the scientific advisory board (SAB) visited the MPIDS for the evaluation of the scientific projects. International experts arrived from the US, Israel and France for the meeting. For the introduction the SAB was received on Sunday in the historical observatory Göttingen, followed by an intensive appraisal of the institute at Faßberg from Monday to Wednesday.

The kissing of the Gänseliesel to celebrate the PHD certificates, which took place on January 1st, was mentioned by the local newspaper HNA.

Some of the new PHD's come from our institute: Julie Murison, Max Neudecker and Daniel Herde. Congratulations :)

With our research on fossil microbial mats, we made it onto the cover of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The story is about how such fossils, characterized by a pronounced short-wavelength (few millimeters) ripple structure, may emerge. This has been quite a puzzle ever since the discovery of these fossils, which are called Kinneyia. In our labs, we have been able to reproduce this structure in a model 'biofilm', suggesting that the pattern is due to a hydrodynamic instability.

At the institute's firedrill every employee learned what to do in case of fire and how to handle the fire extinguishers. It took place with nice sunny and cold weather and proved again, that learning can be fun.

Today, about 60 new starting students for physics at the university of Göttingen visited our institute. During the institute tour we presented the x-ray tomograph "NanoTom" and the laser laboratory with the confocal Raman microscope of our department. For their studies we wish our visitors a lot of fun and success.