International Doctorate Program
Topological Insulators
Prof. Dr. Dieter Weiss
I have been working in the field of nanostructured semiconductors since the end of the 80ies, i.e. for nearly three decades. My affair with this topic started at the Max-Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart where we explored, at that time, the motion of electrons in artificial crystals, meaning two-dimensional electron systems with superimposed periodic potentials. Depending on the strengths and the form of the superlattice potential, pronounced commensurability oscillations of the resistance, also widely known as “Weiss-oscillations”, were found to characterize the magnetoresistance of these systems. Since 1995 I am a full professor of physics in Regensburg. Besides having been Dean of the Physics Faculty and member of the Senate of the University of Regensburg for some time, I have been the spokesperson of DFG (German Science Foundation) funded research consortia (Research Unit FOR 370, Collaborative Research Center SFB689) on spintronics for more than 17 years.
Today the focus of my research is on:
  • the physics around spin injection, -detection and -manipulation in two-dimensional electron systems and spin-orbit fields in semiconductor-ferromagnet hybrid systems,
  • transport and spin-transport in nanopatterned graphene, and transport in (nanopatterned) topological insulators, mostly HgTe based.