Our former colleague Dr. Manish Garg from Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research has been awarded the Rudolf Kaiser Prize 2022 – one of the most prestigious German prizes for young scientists in the field of physics. The Rudolf Kaiser Prize was given to Dr. Manish Garg for “the development of a quantum microscope, which enables probing of electronic and atomic dynamics in matter at fundamental space-time limits”.
Seeing the motion of electrons and atoms in molecules and condensed media at both their natural length and time scales is a long-awaited dream of natural sciences, as it is the key to understand and achieve full control of electronic and atomic processes in chemical reactions, exciton dynamics in atomically thin two-dimensional materials, cooper-pair dynamics in superconductors, etc. Reaching such spatial or temporal resolutions is nowadays possible, but not simultaneously. By integrating scanning tunneling microscopy, attosecond technology and ultrafast Raman spectroscopy, the work of Manish Garg and his team has broken this fundamental limitation of physical sciences. He and his team have recorded the first real space-time snapshots of electronic motion in molecules (Garg et al., Nature Photonics 16, 196-202 (2022) and Garg et al., Science 367, 411-415 (2020)).
Manish Garg will be awarded the Rudolf Kaiser Prize 2022 on February 6th at 2 pm in a festive event at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart.