people

group members

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PI: Christian Schäfer (mail)

orcid, google-scholar, LinkedIn

Short vita

Since 2025: Faculty member at the TU Wien

2023-2025: Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the Department of Physics at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

2021-2023: PostDoc at the Department of Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2) at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

2016-2020: PhD Student at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD), Hamburg, Germany

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Visiting PhD student: Kai Müller

Short vita

now: PhD student with Prof. Dr. Walter Strunz at the TU Dresden

previously: BSc and MSc at TU Dresden

Projects

No quantum system is perfectly isolated, and for many applications, the bath plays an essential role. Kai is developing methods that can describe larger many-body systems (strongly) interacting with a structured bath. Such methods are important to understand optical features of molecules that are embedded in host materials. They also provide novel insight into miniature versions of lasers which comprise only a few molecules in nanometer-sized cavities.

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Master student: Nils K. Drakenfors

Short vita

now: master studies at Chalmers University of technology

Projects

Enantiomer-selective synthesis is essential for the pharmaceutical industry. One promising direction is to couple molecules strongly to resonators (cavities) which modifies their reactivity. Using chiral cavities renders this process enantiomer selective. Nils is using finite-difference time-domain calculations in combination with generative adversarial networks to identify ideal resonator structures for chiral polaritonics.

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Master student: Erik K. Öhman

Short vita

now: master studies at Chalmers University of technology

Projects

Erik uses computational ab initio methods and machine learning to identify promising guest-host combinations for molecular quantum light-matter interfaces.