I am a physics student at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB) with research experience associated with the Department of Nonlinear Optics. I am regularly contributing to open-source soft- and hardware which often also leads to various contract work. At the moment, I am working as a research assistant with the Hybrid Photonics Group at the Fraunhofer HHI, generally active in areas requiring a good understanding of both computers and physics.

Like designing opto-electronic integrated circuits, developing design, analysis, and automation tools, writing computer simulations to answer questions in physics, training deep neural networks, and more.

“There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.” Freeman Dyson

Charge Transport in Nanostructures

Structures within our computer processors, solar cells, lasers, batteries etc. are so small that electrons often behave like quantum mechanical waves rather than particles making their behavior much more difficult to predict. Since it isn’t possible to hold a probing needle on a particle 10.000x smaller than the diameter of a human hair, using THz spectrosopy is an essential new tool to probe the conductivity of nanoparticles. Making sense of that physics, quantum mechanically, is what the majority of my research in the past has been focusing on.

Photonic Integrated Circuits

Lithography techniques now allow us to reduce large, complicated, thus costly and time-consuming optical setups down to chips only a few mm in size. Such photonic integrated circuits are essential for computing and modern communication / data transmission technologies. Still, creating them comes with a lot of exciting challenges as the field is still very young compared to that of integrated electronic circuits. Personally, I think a lot about photonic design automation (How can we design PICs better and faster?)

I have been part of more than five tape-outs so far, creating up to 50% of all the designs on it as well as the overall wafer layout, ensuring that all designs are indeed functional, establishing and enforcing design standards, developing new building blocks to be used within our group, and running and automating large simulations.