Crystal growing: BTU researcher receives young talent award for basic research

With the DGKK Prize for Young Scientists, the German Society for Crystal Growth and Crystal Growth (DGKK) honours outstanding scientific achievements by young scientists in the field of crystal growth and crystal growth. It is endowed with 2500 euros. The 2025 award winner is Dr Owen Ernst, a researcher in the chair of Physical Chemistry at the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg (BTU). Three questions for the award winner.

Dr Ernst, congratulations on this wonderful prize. Please explain the background to the research for which you have been honoured.

Ernst: Crystals play a central role in our highly technologised societies. Not as jewellery or healing stones, however, but as a technology platform. Today's electronics such as mobile phones, laptops and televisions would be inconceivable without crystals such as silicon, gallium nitride or silicon carbide. Crystalline materials are also used in lasers, solar cells and many other technologies. The art lies in the production of the crystals. The structures of the material can already be influenced at this stage, which is crucial for the subsequent application, as crystals are predominantly required today in the form of fine structures, e.g. on microchips.

How can your research be useful in crystal production?

My work can save material, as the fine structures for electronics are often cut out of complete crystal layers or etched (top-down approach). A large proportion of the material is lost in the process. The holy grail lies in the development of bottom-up approaches, in which only the required structures are grown from the outset. In my doctoral thesis at the Leibniz Institute for Crystal Growth in Berlin, I set myself the task of not only describing the formation of these structures theoretically, but also predicting and realising them in the laboratory. At the Franco-German Conference on Crystal Growth, I was honoured to receive the Young Scientist Award of the Crystal Growing Association DGKK, which is endowed with 2500 euros. My work on local growth and structure formation on crystalline substrates, which also forms the basis for our research at BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg, was honoured.

What do you think of the recognition and what happens now?

I am very pleased that my work has been well received and recognised with this important award. I can now continue my research in this field at BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg and advance the value creation of crystals for future technologies. My team and I will now dedicate ourselves to the next stage of technology development based on crystalline materials: the production of isotope-pure semiconductors for semiconductor-based quantum technology.