HIMALAYA project
The collective dance of electrons causes normally absent exotic properties in materials. Such properties include phase transitions from insulators to metals activated by heat, pressure or light. Understanding and technologically harnessing these properties is difficult, because they take place on femtosecond (quadrillionth of a second) time scales and nanometer length scales. In the HIMALAYA research, Kraus "climbs" to new levels of super-resolution microscopy. That is, microscopy with nanometer resolution, above and beyond what conventional microscopes can observe. With this new technique, researchers can observe the correlated dance of electrons in time and space to unravel what drives these exotic material transformations. Read more about the research here.
UltraX project
The UltraX project is being conducted jointly with Gertjan Koster of the University of Twente. With the UltraX project, the researchers aim to gain a better understanding of highly correlated materials. These are materials that are theoretically predicted to behave as conductors, but then turn out to be insulators in experiments. Currently, little is known about the properties of these materials. Read more about the research here.