The academic staff of the Institut für Materialphysik currently comprises two professors (Prof. Dr. H.
Mehrer, Prof. Dr. G. Schmitz), two assistant professors (Hochschuldozent Dr. H. Bracht, Privatdozent Dr. N.A.
Stolwijk), and two emeriti (Prof. a. D. Dr. Chr. Herzig, Prof. a. D. Dr. E. Nembach). The service staff including
secretaries, laboratory technicians, electronic and mechanical workshop members amounts to eleven permanent
employees. Furthermore, presently four postdoctoral fellows and scientific guests are members of the institute.
In addition about twenty-five graduate students (diploma and doctoral degree) are working in the laboratories of
the institute. Some of them are teaching assistants supported by funds of the institute, most of them are supported
by research grants.
Research projects at the Institut für Materialphysik are usually carried out by small groups or by
individuals supervised by one of the professors. A substantial part of the research activities is pursued by
graduate students within time-limited research grants during their dissertation. Research projects often require
cooperations with groups at our own university, at other universities in Germany and abroad, and at national or
international research centers.
The service facilities of the institute include a mechanical and an electronic workshop. The institute is equipped
with various facilities for teaching and research in the area of materials science. We mention some of the more
important examples: well equipped laboratories for work with radioisotopes in diffusion research, various detection
facilities for radionuclides, mechanical and sputtering devices for depth profiling, electron microprobe analyser,
analytical transmission electron microscope, precision ion mill for cross section preperation,
tomographic atom probe, X-ray facilities including powder diffractometer, Laue- and Debye-Scherrer camera,
optical metallography, spark erosion facilities, a variety of high-temperature furnaces for melting materials, for
growing single-crystals, and for annealing, UHV sputter chamber for thin film deposition, tensile testing machine,
spreading resistance devices and an electrochemical capacitance-voltage device for depth profiling of doping
elements in semiconductors, deep level transient spectroscopy for semiconductors, impedance spectroscopy for
ion conducting materials, high pressure cell for pressures up to 0.8 GPa.
In January 2000 a Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB 458) was established by the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster and granted for a
further funding period (2003 - 2005) in autumn 2002. In close cooperation, research groups from the Faculty of
Natural Sciences coordinate their efforts towards the topic "Ionic motion in materials with disordered structures".
The aim of the
Sonderforschungsbereich is a better understanding of ionic motion from the elementary jump process of ions up
to their macroscopic transport properties. Presently, the Institut für Materialphysik contributes three
research projects in the areas of ion-conducting glasses and polymer electrolytes to the program of the
Sonderforschungsbereich.
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