21 Dec 2018
Previous winners of ERC grants can apply for further support to pursue leads that emerge from their initial ERC-funded projects. LMU physicist Alexander Högele has now received funding for further work on a novel form of optical microscopy.
© Jan Greune / LMU
Physicist Alexander Högele’s research has received funding from the ERC since 2013, when he received a Starting Grant, which was followed in 2017 by the award of a Consolidator Grant. Högele has now won what is known as an ERC Proof-of-Concept Grant, which is specifically intended to permit awardees to translate findings made and insights gained from ERC-funded projects into practical innovations.
Alexander Högele works on nanomaterials that exhibit outstanding optical properties. In collaboration with research groups led by Professor David Hunger (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) and Nobel Laureate Professor Theodor W. Hänsch (Faculty of Physics, LMU), he has also developed a sensitive method to image single nanoparticles by optical microscopy. With the aid of the ERC Proof-of-Concept Grant, Högele and his colleagues plan to build a “cavity-enhanced optical microscope” (to cite the project’s title), which will employ an optical resonator to amplify the interaction between light and matter sufficiently to enable individual nanoparticles to be visualized.
For more information on Prof. Högele’s work, see: Thin Films, Bright Future (12.01.2017)