Nina Rohringer joins CFEL's MPG-ASG

Nina Rohringer joins the Max Planck Advanced Study Group at CFEL as Group Leader for the “X-ray Quantum Optics” group.

On February 14, 2011, Nina Rohringer joined the Max Planck Advanced Study Group at CFEL as a Max Planck Research Group leader. She will set up and lead the X-ray Quantum Optics Group of the MPG-ASG.

Nina Rohringer is a theoretical physicist with focus on Atomic, Molecular and Optical (AMO) physics. She has received her PhD from Vienna University of Technology, Austria (Technische Universität Wien) in 2005, with a dissertation on fundamental aspects of Time Dependent Density Functional Theory. During her postdoctoral appointment at Argonne National Laboratory, Nina switched to the field of X-ray AMO science. Her theoretical work on the interaction of high-intensity X-ray free-electron laser radiation with atoms helped to guide and interpret the first user experiments at the LCLS short wavelength X-ray FEL. In 2007 she joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where she started a theoretical and experimental effort to study the interaction of X-ray FELs with dense atomic gases. This project culminated in an experimental realization of the first laboratory atomic inner-shell X-ray laser.

Nina’s research group at CFEL will focus on the study of quantum optical processes in the X-ray regime and the development of new theoretical/numerical tools to study resonant interaction of high-intensity X-rays with atoms, small molecules and dense atomic gases.