Nobel Laureate Reinhard Genzel congratulates Christoph Stihler

The Photonics Days Jena bring together excellent scientists and leading companies in the field of photonics and offer international young researchers a broad platform for knowledge transfer. As part of this, Prof. Dr. Dr. Reinhard Genzel was invited to give a lecture on his forty years of research work on the mass distribution in the centre of our Milky Way, where his team suspects an object with four million solar masses.

In addition, the Photonics Days will honour particularly original and innovative theses that deal with the topics of applied photonics. A jury of experts, consisting of representatives from science and industry, helped to select the theses in the categories Bachelor's, Master's/Diploma and Dissertation, which, as key technologies, contribute to solving upcoming challenges for society, business and industry. In addition, the jury awarded a special prize for extraordinary application potential.

Exactly this prize was awarded yesterday (29.09.2021) virtually to Dr. Christoph Stihler from Prof. Jens Limpert's "Fiber & Waveguide Lasers" group. The jury sees great potential in overcoming the phenomenon of so-called "transverse mode instability" (TMI) in fibre lasers, since with the help of C. Stihler's findings, a further increase in the average power of fibre lasers with ideal beam quality is possible. The variety of applications is correspondingly large - the removal of deep space rubbish by bombarding the fragments with such powerful ground- or satellite-based lasers is also conceivable, for example.

Further prizes were awarded for:

• Best dissertation to Dr Tobias Schnabel (Bauhaus University Weimar) with the topic "Photocatalytic degradation of pharmaceutical micropollutants on carrier-bound catalysts".
• Best Master's thesis to Luise Hoffmann (Clausthal University of Technology) with the topic "Fabrication and characterisation of femtosecond laser-alloyed nickel mesh electrodes for alkaline water electrolysis".
• As well as Best Bachelor's Thesis to Katrin Bihr (Furtwangen University) with the topic "Depth Measurement in Endoscopic 3D Systems".

The "Applied Photonics Awards" will be presented again in 2021 with the kind support of the Association of German Engineers (VDI) and the companies Active Fiber Systems, JENOPTIK and TRUMPF.