26.09.18 – Professors Rainer Beck and Christoph Bostedt, at EPFL’s Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering, have been elected Fellows of the American Physical Society.

The American Physical Society (APS) is the world’s largest organization of physicists. It was founded in 1899 with the aim to “to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics”. Today, the APS numbers some 50,000 members worldwide, and publishes over a dozen scientific journals, including the prestigious Physical Review and Physical Review Letters. It also runs more than twenty science conferences each year, and is a member society of the American Institute of Physics.

Despite its size, APS Fellows make up a mere 0.5% of the Society’s membership, making it a distinct honor. According to its criteria, fellowships is awarded for “exceptional contributions to the physics enterprise; e.g., outstanding physics research, important applications of physics, leadership in or service to physics, or significant contributions to physics education.”

This year, the APS has elected into its Fellows Professors Rainer Beck and Christoph Bostedt at EPFL’s Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering (ISIC). Professor Beck’s research focuses the elementary steps of chemical reactions between gas-phase molecules and solid surfaces. His lab uses molecular beams and laser radiation to probe reaction processes at a molecular level by performing quantum state resolved reactivity measurements. The APS citation for Professor Beck reads: “For pioneering experimental studies of quantum-state-resolved of gas-surface reaction dynamics”.

Professor Bostedt is an expert on ultrafast x-ray sciences with applications to physical chemistry. He uses intense, femtosecond x-ray pulses from novel free-electron laser sources to image the structure and non-equilibrium dynamics in nanometer-sized particles and he develops novel non-linear x-ray spectroscopy approaches to investigate electronic and nuclear dynamics in atoms, molecules, and clusters. The APS citation for Professor Bostedt reads: “For pioneering studies that elucidate the mechanisms and dynamics of high-intensity x-ray interactions with nanoparticles”.