Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Wolfgang Eberhardt

Scientific director for Energy Research of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin for Materials and Energy (HZB)

Wolfgang Eberhardt was born in 1950 in Lieser (Germany). He studied physics at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen (Diploma 1974) and at the University of Hamburg. He obtained his PhD as a member of the synchrotron radiation research group at DESY in 1978.

Afterwards he spent more than 12 years as researcher in the US – first as postdoc and Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania, afterwards at Brookhaven National Laboratory and more than 7 years as a scientist in the corporate research laboratory of EXXON.

1990 he followed a call as director of the Institute for ‚Electronic Properties’ at the IFF of the Research Centre Jülich, jointly with a professorship at the Universität zu Köln. From 2001 to 2008 he was the scientific director of BESSY with a professorship at the TU Berlin. In 2003 he was awarded an honorary PhD from Uppsala University (Sweden).

With the merger of BESSY and HMI to establish the new Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin for Materials and Energy (HZB) he became the scientific director for Energy Research of this new centre.

The more than 300 refereed publications of Wolfgang Eberhardt concern the experimental investigation of the electronic properties of atoms, molecules, and solids as determined with angle resolved photoemission and (resonant) X-ray emission. In these investigations he is using synchrotron radiation as excitation source. His special research area includes the electronic properties and magnetism of thin-film systems for magnetoelectronic applications and their femtosecond magnetization dynamics. Additionally, his research interests cover the electronic properties and atomic geometry of individual size-selected nanoparticles (clusters). He has done pioneering studies concerning the femtosecond dynamics of core electron excitation and decay processes in molecules and solids, the now well established core-hole clock method. Furthermore, he is a world-known expert for the generation and application of synchrotron radiation.

In addition, he is a member of numerous scientific advisory boards. As part of this work he was involved in formulating two recent reports for the US Department of Energy (DoE).

Contact: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Wolfgang Eberhardt, e-mail, tel.: +49-(0)30/6392-4710, www.helmholtz-berlin.de