Christian Wäckerlin

Mission

In the future, the global society will even critically rely on systems for information and communications technology. We will want to perform more operations (data storage, signal transmission, and computation) faster, with less energy and on devices involving fewer atoms.

Our mission is to explore electronic transport through low-dimensional (1D and 2D) metal-organic nanomaterials from a basic science perspective. We want to obtain a fundamental understanding of their geometrical and electronic structure and their magnetic properties to ultimately exploit our new knowledge towards prototype devices.

We synthesize the low-dimensional metal-organic nanomaterials by chemical reaction of metal atoms and precursor molecules directly at surfaces in ultra-high-vacuum. In order to characterize and understand their formation, electronic properties and in particular their electronic conductivity, we combine low-temperature scanning probe microscopy (STM/nc-AFM) with photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS, UPS) and X-ray absorption spectroscopy/X-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XAS/XMCD). We also employ a unique in-situ variant of time-of-flight mass spectrometry (ToF-SIMS) as a method for the extremely precise analytics of our nanomaterials.