HAWK Professor Christoph Gerhard with visiting professorship at the University of Marseille

The focus of this research stay is to investigate the influence of the manufacturing quality of dielectric materials on their surface purity and laser damage threshold. This project with the original title "Etude de l'impact de la qualité de fabrication de matériaux diélectriques sur leur pureté et endommagement laser" is funded by the Fonds d'Intervention Recherche, a mobility initiative of the Aix-Marseille Université.

Located in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille, this university is one of the largest francophone universities in the world with around 74,000 students and 7,700 employees. It was founded in 2011 through the merger of three existing universities in the southern French region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur.
Prof. Gerhard has maintained an extremely active collaboration with LP3 since 2013 and has spent several research visits there as part of the EU mobility programme LaserlabEurope. In addition, two return visits by a guest researcher from LP3 to the HAWK took place in 2023. The cooperation, which is continuously deepening and consolidating, has so far resulted in nine journal articles, 24 contributions at international and national conferences and a book chapter. Joint research results on analysing heavy metals in soil samples were also presented in a report by the French TV channel "TV5 Monde" (source: C. Vienne, H. Vienne, A. Vidal de la Blache, S. Berge, Y. Bodineau, T. Peyronel, F. Zahler: Calanques en eaux troubles, Envoyé spécial, broadcast on 28 July 2016 on TV5 Monde, available at https://paca.eelv.fr/newsletter_archive/video-calanques-en-eaux-troubles-3/ ). Additionally, a joint research proposal was recently submitted to the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection.

About the person
Prof Dr Gerhard is Professor of Physics/Instrumental Analysis at the HAWK Faculty of Engineering and Health in Göttingen and heads the Laboratory for Analytical Measurement Technology there. From 2016 to 2018, he was Visiting Professor of Optical Design at the Politecnico di Milano in Milan/Italy, where he also is Adjunct Professor of Engineering Physics since 2021. Furthermore, he is an ERASMUS lecturer at the Institut d'Optique Graduate School in Palaiseau/France since 2017. As part of his work as the faculty's internationalisation officer, he has been able to gain not only these two universities, but also other universities abroad such as the Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata, the Universidad de Sevilla and the Universidad de Málaga as ERASMUS partners of the HAWK.