The UGO Prize for excellent research has been awarded to physicist Svend-Age Biehs. The 39-year-old was honoured at a ceremony on Wednesday for his work in the field of radiative heat transfer at the nanoscale. Biehs studied and completed his doctorate at the Institute of Physics at the University of Oldenburg.
He received the Weser-Ems Science Prize from the OLB Foundation in 2008 for his dissertation, which was supported by scholarships from the Heinz Neumüller Foundation and the German National Academic Foundation. Another scholarship from the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina then took him to the renowned Institute d'Optique in Paris for two years, where he continued his research stay on radiative heat transfer, which had already fascinated him as a student. He completed his habilitation in 2014 after returning to Oldenburg.
Thermal radiation is an everyday phenomenon that has been well understood for over a hundred years. However, if you look at thermal radiation between objects that are so close together that only a few atoms can fit between them, the laws change dramatically. In order to capture this, a near-field scanning thermal microscope was developed in Oldenburg that is unique in the world and makes it possible to experimentally capture this phenomenon.
In recent years, Biehs has worked closely with his Parisian colleague Dr Philippe Ben-Abdallah to research theoretical concepts for diodes, transistors and memories, which do not work with electrical currents as in a computer chip, but with heat currents. In principle, heat could be used to perform computing operations like in a computer, says Biehs about his research. However, the potential benefit lies more in the fact that these elements offer new possibilities for the targeted dissipation of heat at the nanoscale.
