From Stanford to the Ruhr area

First joint Research Alliance Ruhr appointment

Top researcher Prof. Dr. Xijie Wang has taken up his professorship for ultrafast electron diffraction at two universities. It is a first for the University Alliance Ruhr and its newly founded Research Alliance. In years to come, the renowned physicist will be conducting research at both the University of Duisburg-Essen and TU Dortmund University. Prior to his move, Wang spent ten years as a senior scientist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at the elite American university Stanford.

Professor Dr. Xijie Wang is known worldwide for his unique research experiments: He investigates how extremely rapid changes in materials can be made visible. He now wants to establish the method of ultra-fast electron diffraction and imaging (Mega-Electron-Volt Ultrafast Electron Diffraction, MeV-UED) at two UA Ruhr universities, their physics faculties and at the Research Center Chemical Sciences and Sustainability of the Research Alliance Ruhr. For this purpose, the University of Duisburg-Essen has appointed him and seconded him to TU Dortmund University on a 50 percent basis..

Wang is planning a MeV-UED facility, a unique experimental setup for both liquid-phase chemistry and the investigation of solid quantum materials. The DELTA Center for Synchrotron Radiation in Dortmund will be expanded for the MeV-UED experiment. Apart from providing the renowned physicist with the best conditions for his research, the building will also be important for other scientists from the Research Center Chemical Sciences and Sustainability and will strengthen cutting-edge research in the RESOLV Cluster of Excellence at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, the third partner of the University Alliance Ruhr.

Ultra-fast electron diffraction enables the observation of natural processes with extremely high temporal resolution in the femtosecond range. The electrons used by Professor Wang reach almost the speed of light. “In the experiment, we shoot a very high-energy electron beam at a material. When they hit atoms, the electrons 'bounce' off them and are scattered in different directions. This scattering (or 'diffraction') creates a pattern that we see on a special screen. Based on this, we can create a movie that shows how the atoms are arranged and change in the material,” explains Professor Xijie Wang.

Wang developed MeV-UED at the turn of the millennium and has done widely recognized pioneering work in the application of this still little-used method. In 2019, he set up the world's first user facility for MeV-UED at SLAC, an “electron camera” that is now open to a broad scientific community. The potential is huge: “We can use ultrafast electron diffraction to find out how water and other substances behave during chemical and biological reactions, for example.” This is useful, for example, in the development of more efficient solar cells, new medicines or technologies such as batteries.

Wang's path led him to the USA after completing his physics degree at Shaanxi Normal University in China in 1982. His first stop there was the University of California Los Angeles, where he completed his doctorate in 1992. He then conducted research at Brookhaven National Laboratory for over 20 years. He then worked as a scientist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center until 2023. Among other things, he was significantly involved in research into laser accelerators, high-brilliance electron beams and free-electron lasers. In 2021, he received the prestigious Nuclear and Plasma Science Society's Particle Accelerator Science and Technology Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for outstanding contributions to the development of particle accelerator science.

He is also the author of numerous renowned publications that have attracted worldwide attention.

https://www.uni-due.de/cenide/en/news-detail.php?id=from-stanford-to-the-ruhr-area