ERC Starting Grant for Prof. Alexander Holleitner

The European Research Council (ERC) awarded a Starting Grant to Professor Alexander Holleitner (Technische Universität München). Alexander Holleitner received the Award for his project ‘NanoREAL’ on real-time nanoscale optoelectronics. The award amounts to approximately 1.3 million euros over a period of five years. Starting Grants are designed to support cutting-edge research by supporting outstanding researchers who have already shown themselves to be particularly creative.

The vision of the ERC proposal ‘NanoREAL’ is to investigate the real-time dynamics of photoexcited charge carriers in electrically contacted nanosystems with the highest precision possible. By doing so, unique information about the optoelectronic processes in nanoscale circuits shall be obtained. Towards this vision an optoelectronic ‘on-chip’ detection scheme will be applied to nanoscale circuits, which was developed by the group of Professor Holleitner very recently. In this setup, Professor Holleitner intends to carry out time-of-flight experiments of photoexcited electrons in nanoscale circuits, to investigate the ultimate switching speed of optoelectronic devices, and to explore the ultrafast dynamics of photothermo-electric currents in electrically contacted nanosystems. The project gives essential insights for designing and implementing nanoscale circuits into optoelectronic switches, photodetectors, solar cells, thermo-electric devices as well as high-speed off-chip/on-chip communication modules to make ultrafast nanoscale optoelectronics real.