Nina Rohringer is an Austrian physicist whose research concerns ultra-fast pulses fromfree-electronX-ray lasers, and their interactions with matter. She is a lead scientist atDESY, a professor at theUniversity of Hamburg, and a faculty member of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, in Germany.
Rohringer earned a diploma atTU Wien, inVienna, in 2000. She continued there for a PhD, completed in 2005. Her dissertation wasQuantitative test of time-dependent density functional theory: Two-electron systems in an external laser field.[1]
After postdoctoral research in the US at theArgonne National Laboratory andLawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and continued work as a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore, she became a group leader in theMax Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems inDresden in 2011, also affiliated with theDESY Center for Free-Electron Laser Science inHamburg.[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 theUniversity 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]
It was during Rohringer's postdoctoral research at Argonne that her research focus shifted fromdensity functional theory to X-ray atomic physics.[4] While at Lawrence Livermore, she used the nearbyLinac Coherent Light Source at theSLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to energize high-pressureneon 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 theEuropean XFEL has used X-ray pulses to explore ionization inwarm dense matter.[6]
Rohringer was named as aFellow 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]
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