Rolf Walter LORTZ

Research interest

Prof. Rolf W. Lortz’s research interests are the thermal, electrical, magnetic, and spectroscopic properties of quantum materials. His team is looking for materials with novel electronic properties in which it can study and manipulate quantum states by applying various control parameters, including high magnetic fields, high pressure, gate voltages, strain and proximity contacts. Prof. Lortz’s team is investigating their properties on bulk materials and then integrates them in low-dimensional 2D and 1D quantum devices. Its main focus is on topological superconductors that exhibit Majorana-fermionic states. These states are of great interest for future developments of fault-tolerant topological qubits in quantum computing. Prof. Lortz is an experimentalist dedicated to the development of sophisticated experimental tools, all specifically tailored to the requirements of different applications.

Biography

Prof. Rolf W. Lortz is an experimental hard condensed matter physicist. He graduated with a diploma in Physics from the University of Karlsruhe (now Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) in Germany in 1999 and received his doctorate in Science there in 2002. He stayed for one year as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute of Solid-State Physics in Karlsruhe. He then worked as a Senior Research and Teaching Associate at the University of Geneva in Switzerland in Prof. Alain JUNOD’s group from 2003. In 2005, after Prof. Junod’s retirement, he took over the thermodynamics laboratory and continued to run it until 2008. During the latter period, he worked independently, only formally affiliated to Prof. Jean-Marc TRISCONE’s group. In 2008, he took up a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in the Department of Physics at The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. In 2014 he was promoted to Associate Professor and in 2020 to Full Professor.