Beginning each day with curiosity
For physicists, extreme cold is a tool to be used for freezing unwanted particle movements and thus enabling the quantum physics properties of materials to be measured as unhindered as possible. This is why handling cryostats – i.e. high-performance cooling equipment – is part of the everyday work carried out by Prof. Ursula Wurstbauer and her team at the Institute of Physics.
When asked whether anything ever went wrong in her work, Wurstbauer repeats an anecdote from the laboratory: during her post-doc phase at Columbia University in New York (USA), she was cooling down a cryostat and overlooked a porous indium wire seal which was not gas-tight. The valuable device almost immediately iced over. Evaporating helium and nitrogen could not escape, and the internal pressure rose continuously. “I had inadvertently built a ‘bomb’, and in the end the high pressure would have destroyed the device itself – at the very least. Her supervisor, who was over 70, looked at the result, she recounts, and said, “You see to it”. She had about three to four hours left in which to solve the problem in time. Ursula Wurstbauer kept her head and melted the ice with a warm copper rod. Looking back, she can now laugh at the mishap; it did nothing to dampen her enthusiasm for her work.
She had actually wanted to study Sport up to master’s level. During her schooldays she went in for gymnastics in a club and took part in competitions; she was also an ice-skater and did skiing. In the end, she decided not to study Sport because of the lack of career opportunities. Instead, she studied Maths and Physics at the University of Regensburg, with the aim of becoming a teacher, and she took Sport as her third subject. She also studied for her diploma in Physics. “I still ended up as a teacher,” she says, “but at university and not at a school.” The things she likes most of all about her work include teaching and supervising young adults in their research projects.
“My Physics teacher in the sixth-form was fantastic at kindling a love of physics in us,” Wurstbauer remembers. She grew up in a small town near Passau, in an area near the German, Austrian and Czech borders, and as a nine-year-old she saw the first trains arriving from Prague after the Iron Curtain fell. “Our physics teacher trusted us, and we were even allowed to repair the school’s electronic devices,” she says. In this way, he instilled in his pupils the necessary self-confidence to make them unafraid to tackle complicated technology. The ‘initial spark’ which pushed Ursula Wurstbauer in the direction of a Physics professorship happened years later, though, while she was an undergraduate. During a period of practical work on quantum physics, she realised: “This is how research works, and that’s what I want to do.”
After her post-doctorate, Ursula Wurstbauer received her habilitation at Munich Technical University. The appointment to a professorship of Nanoelectronics at the University of Münster followed in 2019. Her working group – around 20-strong – aims to understand the fundamental properties of materials: for example, how charge carriers and photons in solids behave, and how a material’s properties can be controlled externally. This research at the interface between nanophysics and quantum physics looks at two-dimensional materials, some of which have astonishing and, often, as-yet-unresearched properties. So far, Wurstbauer has been involved in more than 100 scientific publications on the topic. Having the opportunity every day to be curious, to puzzle over things, to drive experimental methods forwards – these are the things which make basic research so appealing to her.
Was it difficult for her to assert herself in the male-dominated world of Physics? “I never encountered any headwind in that respect – neither in school, nor as a student, and not as a researcher later, either,” says Wurstbauer, whose parents hadn’t been able to go to university in the years immediately after the Second World War. However, something that certainly is a challenge, she says, is juggling family and career, although support was and is available in the working environment. “Munich was not ideal for us as a young family. For one thing, the journeys to and from work were long,” she recalls. She and her husband (also a physicist) moved to Münster with their two children, who at that time were still in kindergarten. Here, the distances are shorter. Nevertheless, the balancing act between family and job is not easy, she says. “I’m glad – and proud, too – that in spite of everything we have managed to reconcile our careers with our children’s needs and hobbies.”
Ursula Wurstbauer loves physics, and the so-called MINT subjects (Mathematics, Informatics, Natural Science and Technology) are particularly close to her heart. Seeing the trepidation with which people still approach these subjects is something that saddens her. “I see that in my private environment: a grade three in Mathematics is something that many families accept, but for the same families a grade three in German or in a foreign language is seen as a bad grade.”
Author: Christina Hoppenbrock
This article is from the University newspaper wissen|leben No. 1, 29 January 2025.