Lorenz Cederbaum, University of Heidelberg, Germany, has received the Erich Hückel Award 2024 from the German Chemical Society (GDCh). The award was presented at the 60th Symposium on Theoretical Chemistry (STC) in Braunschweig, Germany, on September 5, 2024.
The Erich Hückel Award is endowed with EUR 7,500 and honors outstanding work in the field of theoretical chemistry. Cederbaum is recognized for his outstanding achievements in the field, in particular, for his groundbreaking contributions to the quantum dynamics of molecular systems.
His research focuses on the many-body theory, non-adiabatic phenomena, atoms and molecules in strong fields, boson systems, and the energy transfer between molecules. At the end of the 1990s, he predicted the intermolecular Coulomb decay (ICD), which has since been proven experimentally. ICD is an efficient relaxation process of an electronically excited atom or molecule embedded in an environment.
Lorenz Cederbaum was born in Braunschweig in 1946. He studied physics at the University of Munich, Germany, and completed a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1972 at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). After his habilitation in physics there in 1976, he joined the University of Freiburg, Germany, as Professor of Physics. In 1979, he moved to the University of Heidelberg, where he served as Chair of Theoretical Chemistry. Since 2017, he has been a Senior Professor of Theoretical Chemistry in Heidelberg.
Among other honors, Cederbaum has received honorary doctorates from the University of Sofia, Bulgaria, the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, and the University of Debrecen, Hungary. He is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science (IAQMS), as well as an External Scientific Member of the Max-Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, Heidelberg. Cederbaum has received ERC Advanced Investigators Grants from the European Commission in 2008 and 2016.
Selected Publications
- Stimulated Emission of Virtual Photons: Energy Transfer by Light,
Lorenz S. Cederbaum, Alexander I. Kuleff,
J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2024, 15, 7357–7362.
https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpclett.4c01191 - Entanglement and correlations in an exactly-solvable model of a Bose–Einstein condensate in a cavity,
Ofir E. Alon, Lorenz S. Cederbaum,
J. Phys. A Math. Theor. 2024, 57, 295305.
https://doi.org/10.1088/1751-8121/ad5bca - Interatomic and Intermolecular Coulombic Decay,
Till Jahnke, Uwe Hergenhahn, Bernd Winter, Reinhard Dörner, Ulrike Frühling, Philipp V. Demekhin, Kirill Gokhberg, Lorenz S. Cederbaum, Arno Ehresmann, André Knie, Andreas Dreuw,
Chem. Rev. 2020, 120, 11295–11369.
https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.chemrev.0c00106 - What will it take to observe processes in “real time”?,
Stephen R. Leone, C. William McCurdy, Joachim Burgdörfer, Lorenz S. Cederbaum, Zenghu Chang, Nirit Dudovich, Johannes Feist, Chris H. Greene, Misha Ivanov, Reinhard Kienberger, Ursula Keller, Matthias F. Kling, Zhi-Heng Loh, Thomas Pfeifer, Adrian N. Pfeiffer, Robin Santra, Kenneth Schafer, Albert Stolow, Uwe Thumm, Marc J. J. Vrakking,
Nat. Photon. 2014, 8, 162–166.
https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2014.48 - Multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree method for bosons: Many-body dynamics of bosonic systems,
Ofir E. Alon, Alexej I. Streltsov, Lorenz S. Cederbaum,
Phys. Rev. A 2008.
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.77.033613 - Role of Excited States in the Splitting of a Trapped Interacting Bose-Einstein Condensate by a Time-Dependent Barrier,
Alexej I. Streltsov, Ofir E. Alon, Lorenz S. Cederbaum,
Phys. Rev. Lett. 2007.
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.99.030402
