Nina Rohringer

Nina Rohringer is an Austrian physicist whose research concerns ultra-fast pulses from free-electron X-ray lasers, and their interactions with matter. She is a lead scientist at DESY, a professor at the University of Hamburg, and a faculty member of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, in Germany.

Education and career

Rohringer earned a diploma at TU Wien, in Vienna, in 2000. She continued there for a PhD, completed in 2005. Her dissertation was Quantitative test of time-dependent density functional theory: Two-electron systems in an external laser field.^[1]

After postdoctoral research in the US at the Argonne National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and continued work as a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore, she became a group leader in the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden in 2011, also affiliated with the DESY Center for Free-Electron Laser Science in Hamburg.^[1]

After a 2015 reorganization, her group became part of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter. Since 2017 she has been a leading scientist at DESY and a professor at the University of Hamburg.^[1] At the University of Hamburg, she is research group leader for Theory of ultrafast processes with X-ray light in the Institute for Theoretical Physics and Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Natural Sciences.^[2] As well, she continues to hold an affiliation as former group leader and faculty member in the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter.^[3]

Research

It was during Rohringer's postdoctoral research at Argonne that her research focus shifted from density functional theory to X-ray atomic physics.^[4] While at Lawrence Livermore, she used the nearby Linac Coherent Light Source at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to energize high-pressure neon to lase, creating the first atomic X-ray laser, with a much more sharply defined frequency range than free-electron lasers.^[5]

More recently her research with the European XFEL has used X-ray pulses to explore ionization in warm dense matter.^[6]

Recognition

Rohringer was named as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2023, after a nomination from the APS Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics, "for outstanding theoretical concepts in the new field of non-linear X-ray science and experiments at X-ray free electron lasers".^[7]