Group News Archive
2025
02.12.2025: We celebrated the end of a wonderful 2025 with some of our alumni as special guests at the group’s Xmas party.
01.12.2025: Jessica Link is our newest group member! She will be working on Hamiltonian learning for quantum dots as a research intern.
06.10.2025: A warm welcome to Jiaqi Hu, Yufeng Xu, Max Whitfield, Levon Satzger, and Kaiwen Chen, who recently joined the team for their M.Sc. projects, as well as Mascha Kohnemann who joined us as an intern.
01.10.2025: David, Manuel and Tomáš Bučko publish a perspective article on Raman spectroscopy and machine learning, which is featured on the cover of The Journal of Chemical Physics.
08.09.2025: The group welcomes our visitors Ayala Cohen and Aishwarya Singh from the Weizmann Institute of Science.
02.09.2025: Frederik’s work analyzing real-space charge transport channels in halide perovskites appeared as an Editor’s Suggestion in Physical Review Materials.
29.07.2025: Manuel finished his Ph.D. and is now Dr. Grumet – many congratulations!
25.07.2025: TUM’s Atomistic Modeling Center had its first annual retreat and it was a great success – check out the news item.
16.07.2025: Time for our group’s summer BBQ with our visitor Julian Steele from U. Queensland.
23.06.2025: Frederico’s study, published in ACS Energy Letters, uses machine learning to explain how perovskite surfaces stay trap-free. See also news piece by TUM’s NAT School.
16.05.2025: We’ve had a productive and joyful group retreat in the Bavarian Forrest.
05.05.2025: We welcome Mascha Kohnemann, Sebastian Riedl and Hannah Beifuß in our team, who will work on their B.Sc. projects with us.
01.04.2025: The group welcomes Max Binkle, a student from LMU joining us for his M.Sc. thesis.
01.03.2025: Luis Blank is back in our group for a research internship.
24.02.2025: A warm welcome to Olivier Pittet, joining us from EPFL for his MSc research project.
17.02.2025: Yufeng Xu joins us for an internship – welcome to the group!
13.02.2025: Elise finished her Ph.D. “summa cum laude” and is now Dr. Sirotti – many congratulations!
24.01.2025: David is appointed as an Associate in the Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML).
10.01.2025: Great start of 2025: Xiangzhou’s study on overdamped phonons is published in Physical Review Letters.
2024
13.11.2024: Stefan has completed and defended his Ph.D. thesis and is now Dr. Seidl, many congratulations, Stefan!
12.11.2024: We welcome Victor Chen in the group, who will work on his M.Sc. thesis project with us.
31.10.2024: David publishes a perspective article on surface defects of halide perovskites in Advanced Materials together with David Cahen, Yevgeny Rakita and Antoine Kahn.
01.10.2024: We welcome Markus Amaseder back in our group. Supported by a prestigious fellowship by the Wübben foundation, he will work on his M.Sc. thesis with us.
19.09.2024: Around 20 experts discussed the intersections of optoelectronic and battery materials at TUM’s IAS in an international workshop. Here is our group picture.
18.09.2024: Together with our collaborators from Bratislava and TUM we proposed a new method to rapidly characterize Raman signatures of point defects in solid-state ion conductors in JACS.
29.07.2024: Nitride semiconductors are fascinating materials! Elise’s study in a collaboration with the Sharp group shows how one can tune their optoelectronic properties via cation disorder.
01.07.2024: Daniil Platonov and Luis Blank join us for the BSc projects – welcome to our team!
24.06.2024: Four professors from three TUM Schools found the Atomistic Modeling Center (AMC) as a sub-institute of the MDSI to establish interdisciplinary collaborations in atomistic modeling. Here’s the news item.
20.06.2024: Last week our group contributed to a great initiative – TUM’s Sustainability Day. Please see the recent news item at the MDSI website for more details.
12.06.2024: Xiangzhou has completed and defended his Ph.D. work and is now Dr. Zhu, many congratulations!
31.05.2024: We spent a few days in the Bavarian Alps for our group retreat, joined by a couple of llamas.
24.05.2024: Frederik Vonhoff is awarded a prestigious doctoral fellowship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. Many congratulations!
17.05.2024: A multi-team effort led by Sebastian on the role of lone pairs in the anharmonic dynamics of halide perovskites appears in Nature Communications.
09.04.2024: Takeru’s study on machine-learning molecular dynamics for ionic conductors is published in J. Mater. Chem. A
03.04.2024: We developed a Delta-ML method for predicting Raman spectra in collaboration with Tomáš Bučko. See Manuel’s paper that was just published in J. Phys. Chem. C
02.04.2024: Several students join our team: Chiara Spezzati will work on her M.Sc. project with us, and Sonja Buchner, Kaiwen Chen and Jara Stucken on their B.Sc. theses. Welcome to all!
01.04.2024: Martin’s work proposes a new finite-temperature tight-binding model for optoelectronic properties of semiconductors. See our recent article published in J. Chem. Phys.
30.03.2024: We quantified the influence on anharmonic lattice dynamics for optoelectronic properties of nitride semiconductors in Franziska’s recent article published in Advanced Energy Materials. See also the cover story.
20.01.2024: How accurate is ML-MD to describe the complex dynamics in various solid-state ion conductors? Our recent work, led by Takeru, investigates this question – see the arXiv preprint.
2023
12.12.2023: Max is now Dr. Schilcher (see here), many congratulations!
01.12.2023: We celebrated the end of an exciting year at our Xmas party!
28.11.2023: The group welcomes Görkem Tamer as a new M.Sc. student in our team working on ionic conductors.
10.11.2023: Sebastian’s work on double perovskites with the groups of Laura Herz and Thomas Bein is published in JPCL.
01.11.2023: Jonas Oldenstaedt joins our group as a Ph.D. student – great to have you with us in our team, Jonas!
01.10.2023: David has been appointed as a “Core Member” of the Munich Data Science Institute.
15.09.2023: We welcome Dr. Waldemar Kaiser! He joins us to lead a sub-group on the theory of solid-state ion conductors.
01.09.2023: Stefan and Xiangzhou’s paper with the Yaffe group about the anharmonic effect on the band gap appears as a Letter in Physical Review Materials.
23.08.2023: Anharmonicity and dynamic disorder are correlated and determine carrier transport in perovskites. Max’s paper from a great collaboration with David Reichman’s and Liang Tan’s group gets selected as “Editor’s Suggestion” in Physical Review Materials.
18.08.2023: We’ve recently had our group BBQ and a hike to Andechs with great Summer weather.
17.07.2023: Shaoming Zhang joins the team for his M.Sc. thesis project, welcome to the group Shaoming!
09.06.2023: Late paper from Berni with the Lupton group from Regensburg: preaggregation in single-molecule photocatalysis!
07.06.2023: This week, part of our group visited the lab of Omer Yaffe at the Weizmann Institute of Science. We’ve had such a great time!
01.06.2023: We warmly welcome Namita Krishnan, who will work on her M.Sc. thesis with us.
24.05.2023: David has been promoted to Associate Professor with a permanent W3 position (see here), many congratulations!
19.05.2023: We had a great time at our group retreat in Schliersee.
15.05.2023: Takeru Miyagawa joins us for his Ph.D. thesis. Welcome to the group, Takeru!
02.05.2023: The group would like to welcome a new M.Sc. student, Frederico Simões, as well as Simon Hackl who is joining us for his B.Sc. thesis.
27.03.2023: We warmly welcome Konstantin Gattinger, who is joining us for his B.Sc. thesis.
03.03.2023: Some of us attended a theoretical chemistry workshop in Austria, where we tasted the local cuisine during group dinner on the last evening.
03.02.2023: Late work of Christian and Shravan in collaboration with the Yaffe group, on static and dynamic disorder in FA-based perovskites, is published in J. Phys. Chem. Lett.
16.01.2023: We welcome Frederik Vonhoff in the group! He will work on his Ph.D. thesis with us.
2022
14.12.2022: The group celebrated Christmas and the end of the year with an escape game and dinner.
01.12.2022: The group warmly welcomes Philip Schwinghammer, who is joining us to work on his MSc research project.
20.10.2022: Xiangzhou’s collaboration with various experimental and theoretical groups on excitons and phase transitions in 2D perovskites is published in ACS Photonics.
21.09.2022: David writes a Nature “News and Views” article on electrostriction.
19.09.2022: Together with Artem Bakulin, Tim Berkelbach and Omer Yaffe we organized an international meeting with great speakers at TUM-IAS.
07.09.2022: We are very happy that in-person conferences are happening again: part of our group attends the DPG in Regensburg.
03.08.2022: We were out for a group hike in the Bavarian Alps, see here for our peak shot.
02.08.2022: Non-adiabatic couplings in TDDFT with optimally-tuned functionals: Berni’s work is published as a JCP Communication.
27.07.2022: Sebastian’s work with collaborators from the Walter-Schottky Institute on lead-free chiral perovskites is published in JACS.
14.07.2022: David received the “Golden Chalk” by physics students for “Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics” as the best lecture of the B.Sc. program in 2021/22.
23.06.2022: The findings of Manuel’s collaboration with the Yaffe and Zeier groups on dynamics of sodium ion conductors get published in JPCL.
02.06.2022: Christian is now Dr. Gehrmann (see here), many congratulations!
23.05.2022: The group warmly welcomes Clara Scarpatetti, who is joining for her B.Sc. thesis.
21.04.2022: Xiangzhou’s work on disorder in halide perovskites has been published as an “Early-Career Forum Article” in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
12.04.2022: The group has moved to new offices and welcomes its newest members: Christian Reverón Baecker, Franz Pöschl and Markus Amaseder.
04.04.2022: Our work on transversal halide motions is published as a “Rising Star” article in Advanced Science.
24.03.2022: David joins the board of the European Society for Quantum Solar Energy Conversion.
2021
09.12.2021: From the joint work of Christian, Sebastian and Xiangzhou two articles on finite-temperature dynamics in halide perovskites have been recently posted on arXiv.
25.08.2021: Our group outing at the high-ropes park was fun – see here.
02.08.2021: Frederico Delgado joins the group as a PhD student – welcome to the team, Frederico!
20.07.2021: Long time no see: we recently had a half-day group meeting with online visitors and a nice lunch break in Garching.
08.06.2021: Berni’s paper with the Nijhuis group and other collaborators on tuning the conductivity of molecular wires is published in Nature Communications.
15.05.2021: We have published an ACS Energy Letters perspective article on polarons and dynamic disorder in halide perovskites, which has been written with our collaborators and led by Max.
08.03.2021: Stefan’s recent paper summarizes a great team effort to extend the SRSH functional to phonon calculations of semiconductors!
18.01.2021: Franziska Hegner secures a Walter Benjamin Fellowship and joins our group as a postdoctoral fellow. It’s great to have you in our team Franziska!
2020
15.12.2020: Sebastián Caicedo-Dávila joins our group as a postdoctoral fellow. A warm welcome to Sebastián!
08.12.2020: And a great end for the year: Berni’s paper on excited-state potential energy surfaces published in Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation.
30.11.2020: Christian’s work in collaboration with friends from the Yaffe group at Weizmann published as Editors’ suggestion in Physical Review Materials.
17.11.2020: Long overdue update: Karin Thalmann and Martin Schwade recently joined us for working on their MSc theses – a warm welcome to both! And another paper by Xiangzhou on 2D halide perovskites in collaboration with experimental groups appeared in ACS Energy Letters.
10.08.2020: Xiangzhou’s work in collaboration with our experimental partners is published in Nano Letters.
30.06.2020: Our paper on exciton diffusion in 2D halide perovskites with the Chernikov and Yaffe group was posted on arXiv.
09.06.2020: The folks at e-conversion recently interviewed David – see here.
02.06.2020: The group welcomes Waldemar Schmunk. He’ll work as a BSc student in our group.
27.04.2020: We warmly welcome Stefan Böhm as a BSc student in our group.
20.04.2020: The group welcomes Karina Houska, who will work on her BSc project with us.
18.03.2020: David becomes a Fellow of the Young Academy of Europe.
16.03.2020: The entire group works in home office now.
02.03.2020: A warm welcome to Manuel Grumet, who joins our group as a graduate student.
31.01.2020: Great start for the new year: superb team effort of Daniel with our collaborators from the Weizmann Institute makes it into Advanced Materials.
2019
10.12.2019: We celebrated the upcoming end of 2019 with a Christmas party and curling in the Hirschgarten!
06.12.2019: Another paper with our collaborators from the Weizmann Institute was posted on arXiv.
21.11.2019: Our first paper on solid ion conductors with friends from the Weizmann Institute was posted on arXiv.
28.10.2019: Our group welcomes its newest member, Xiangzhou Zhu, who joins us as a graduate student.
02.10.2019: David becomes a PI in the SolTech initiative.
12.09.2019: Congratulations to Berni who received a poster prize at the e-conversion meeting in Venice!
30.08.2019: Lisi’s paper on magnetic configurations at molecule-metal interfaces was published in Physical Review Materials.
22.07.2019: David joins the e-conversion excellence cluster at TUM!
17.07.2019: Christian’s paper on disorder and Urbach energies in halide perovskites has appeared in Nature Communications – see also a news article in German by the University of Regensburg.
12.07.2019: We had our first group outing in Munich to celebrate Hubert’s completed thesis and our start at TUM.
10.07.2019: Our paper on the charge transport through self-assembled monolayers with collaborators from Singapore and Heidelberg was published.
17.06.2019: New city & new group name: our move to TUM has been completed.
03.06.2019: We are very happy to welcome our new group member, Carola Kappauf, who will support our office duties.
13.05.2019: David has accepted a position in the Department of Physics at TUM and we are moving to Munich! Our farewell party with colleagues & friends was the last chance for a group picture in Regensburg.
03.02.2019: Christian’s paper on disorder and Urbach energies in perovskites was posted on arXiv.
01.02.2019: We are happy to be part of a new priority program that will fund perovskite research in Germany.
28.01.2019: Hubert’s benchmark study on structure and binding in halide perovskites has been deposited on arXiv.
<2019
01.12.2018: We are very happy to welcome our new group member Lisi Wruß, who will be working as a postdoctoral fellow with us.
17.10.2018: To say Goodbye to Arun, and to welcome Berni and Daniel, our group recently went on a hike in the lovely Laber valley close to Regensburg.
10.10.2018: A paper with our collaborators from the Weizmann Institute and the University of Pennsylvania on defects in halide perovskites has been deposited on arXiv.
02.10.2018: Max, Christian and David attended the PSCO meeting in Lausanne – we had fun!
01.10.2018: A warm welcome to the new members of our group, Daniel Angerer and Bernhard Kretz.
27.08.2018: Part of our group visited the lab of Omer Yaffe at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
16.07.2018: We are very happy to welcome Arun Sagotra from UNSW Sydney, who is visiting us for the next three months.
29.06.2018: The CMS group visited the impressive Schulerloch cave near Kelheim.
24.05.2018: A paper by David on antimony halide perovskites has been deposited on arXiv.
22.05.2018: We received startup funding within the UR Fellows Program for launching an interdisciplinary initiative with colleagues in experimental physics and chemistry!
14.05.2018: Our group had some exciting days discussing science and hiking along the Danube with our visitor Prof. Andrew Rappe from the University of Pennsylvania.
09.05.2018: Welcome to Harikrishnan K.P from IIT Bombay who is visiting us this summer!
30.04.2018: We are grateful to receive computing time for JUWELS, Jülich supercomputing center.
25.04.2018: David delivers the keynote lecture at the network meeting of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Regensburg.
22.03.2018: What remains unexplained about the properties of halide perovskites? Click here to find out.
12.03.2018: Hubert Beck has joined the group for his M.Sc. thesis, welcome Hubert!
08.02.2018: Our group celebrated its one year anniversary with a dinner and playing some bowling.
05.02.2018: We are happy to welcome Harshini Venkata Annadata from the National University of Singapore as a visiting student.
10.01.2018: Check out our recent collaborative papers, posted on arXiv, on phonons in hybrid perovskites and their relation to carrier lifetimes and ionic composition.
06.12.2017: Our group had fun at a Christmas outing & visited the excellent Kepler museum.
11.10.2017: We are very happy to welcome two new group members: Max Schilcher joins as a PhD student, and Robert Hrdina supports our office duties.
04.07.2017: We visited the lovely Regensburg surroundings for some climbing and paddling action.
08.06.2017: Our group is co-organizing a minisymposium on theoretical chemistry in Regensburg.
26.05.2017: We are proud to be part of SFB 1277, granted by the German Science Foundation.
19.05.2017: Our group celebrated its start at the Regensburg Dult, click here for a group picture!
04.05.2017: We are very happy to welcome Keshav Srinivasan from IIT Bombay as a visiting student!
27.04.2017: We are grateful to receive computing time for JURECA, Jülich supercomputing center.
03.04.2017: Christian Gehrmann has joined us as a PhD student, welcome to the group Christian!
04.03.2017: Stefan Seidl has joined the group as a PhD student, welcome Stefan!
01.02.2017: the CMS group starts in Regensburg, exciting times!
Theory of Functional Energy Materials (TheoFEM) 
