Stefan Muff successfully defends PhD thesis
© H. Dil / EPFL 2017
After four years of devoted work Stefan Muff successfully defended his PhD thesis titled “Manipulation of the two-dimensional states at titanate surfaces studied by ARPES”.
In his work Stefan has investigated how the structure, chemical composition, surface relaxation, and ferroelectricity influence the properties of the 2DEG found at the titanate to vacuum interface. For these studies thin films were grown by Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD) and investigated by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) at the Swiss Light Source of the Paul Scherrer Institut. Besides mapping the parameters to tune the electronic properties of the 2DEG, Stefan also found first spectroscopic evidence for Wannier-Stark localisation on the surface of ferroelectric BaTiO3 and a Rashba-type spin splitting in CaTiO3. The thesis relied on a strong collaboration with Dr. Milan Radovic from the PSI and we thank him for all his input.
The private exam took place at the EPFL in front of a jury of international experts in the field and the public defence was on the 20th of September 2017 at the PSI, resulting in a happy fresh doctor and supervisor. We thank Stefan for his hard work and his unrelenting contribution to the group, and wish him a successful scientific future.
Congratulations Dr. Muff!