Marcus Bär

The Professur für Röntgenspektroskopie at the Department of Chemistry and Pharmacy at FAU was installed in 2018 in the framework of a collaboration with the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie GmbH (HZB) and the Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH.

Simultaneously, Prof. Bär also heads the Research Department „X-ray spectroscopy at interfaces of thin films“ at the Helmholtz-Institute Erlangen-Nürnberg for Renewable Energy (HI ERN) located on the FAU campus. Within his HI ERN activities, Prof. Bär wants to establish the infrastructure for in-situ and operando investigations of (photo)electrocatalytic materials.

The Bär Group is renowned for combining different lab- and synchrotron-based photon-in – electron-out and photon-in – photon-out spectroscopic methods to interrogate the chemical and electronic structure of energy conversion materials and thin-film layer stacks, with a particular focus on photovoltaics. The core expertise of the group is to non-destructively reveal composition and electronic structure profiles by deliberately employing different spectroscopies excited with soft and/or hard x-rays.

Most of the research activities evolve around the Energy Materials In-Situ Laboratory Berlin (EMIL), which is jointly operated by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie GmbH (HZB) and the Max-Planck Gesellschaft, and BESSY II, HZB’s synchrotron radiation facility. Prof. Bär heads the Department of “Interface Design”, which is responsible to run the HZB part of EMIL.

Further information on research activities, analytical methods, publications, staff, and open positions can be found on Prof. Bär´s website at HZB.