Dr. rer. nat. Julian Karst: Award for Groundbreaking Dissertation
Dr. Julian Karst has been honored with one of three awards for the best dissertation. His work, titled “Active & Functional Plasmonic Systems and Metasurfaces,” tackles three key scientific challenges and stands out for its remarkable innovation.
A milestone of his research is the first-ever realization of an electrically switchable metal-insulator transition, which serves as the foundation for the world’s first electrically switchable plasmonic metasurface. Karst successfully harnessed the unique properties of conductive polymers to achieve this effect. Notably, his approach involved the precise electrochemical doping of these metallic polymers to control their charge carrier concentration. This enabled a significant reduction in plasma frequency, making it possible to switch from metallic to dielectric behavior.
Maximilian Hörl: Recognition for Outstanding Thesis
Maximilian Hörl received the Bürkert Prize for his master’s thesis, titled “Flow in Porous Media with Fractures of Varying Aperture.” His research provides valuable contributions to the modeling and numerical simulation of flows in porous media with fractures of varying widths.
Particularly noteworthy is his newly transformed weak formulation, which allows fracture geometry to be incorporated directly into the operator instead of relying on boundary conditions. This approach enables an elegant handling of the transition to vanishing fracture apertures and led to the derivation of a new limit model in mixed-dimensional geometry. Furthermore, Hörl demonstrated the existence of weak solutions for the resulting limit problem.
The Faculty of Mathematics and Physics warmly congratulates Dr. Julian Karst and Maximilian Hörl on their well-deserved awards. Special thanks go to the Christian Bürkert Foundation e. V., whose generous support makes it possible to honor the exceptional scientific achievements of young researchers.