The Rudolf Kaiser Foundation awards early-career scientists, with the aim of highlighting their contributions to experimental physics. An event in honor of the 2025 awardee, Dr. Florian Dirnberger, was organized at the TUM Center for QuantumEngineering (ZQE) to announce the prize and celebrate with colleagues. 

The program opened with words from Dr. Christian Riedel, managing director of the ZQE, highlighting Dirnberger’s leadership in groundbreaking experiments on magnetic two-dimensional (2D) materials, including pioneering discoveries in the photonics of 2D magnetic solids. 

The award was presented by Rainer Lüdtke from the German Foundation Center (Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft), who highlighted the importance of the development of new models, new experimental approaches, and new physical knowledge to better understand the world. Nominated by Prof. Alexey Chernikov, Chair of Ultrafast Microscopy and Photonics at the Dresden University of Technology, Dirnberger was selected for his contributions to experimental physics published in the work "Magneto-optics in a van der Waals magnet tuned by self-hybridized polaritons", published in 2023 in Nature. 

In his prize lecture, Dirnberger presented “Magnetism, Light and Matter – Insights from 2D Materials”, introducing key concepts that have shaped his research, including magnons, excitons, and photons, as well as magnetism in monolayer two-dimensional materials. His work demonstrated strong light-matter coupling in bulk crystals of CrSBr and clear exciton-photon-magnon coupling, an important advance for polariton physics, with potential applications ranging from novel laser concepts to magnon-polariton transduction. Throughout, Dirnberger credited his success in part to excellent collaborators, research infrastructure, and the support of friends and colleagues. 

After Dirnberger’s presentation, Prof. Ruth Müller, Chair of Science and Technology Policy at the School of Social Sciences and Technology at TUM, followed up with a Keynote on “How to Think about Science & Technology in Society”. Her work is situated in the social science research field “Science & Technology Studies” (STS) which explores two main questions: How does social context shape knowledge production and technological innovation? How do new knowledge and new technologies shape society? In her talk, she presented key insights from STS that can guide scientists and the public alike in how to think about science and technology in society. She discussed how science and technology are always inherently social and political in their effects on society; how many technologies affect society in ambivalent ways, creating both novel opportunities but also challenges for society; and that publics tend to assess not technologies or new knowledge in isolation but rather “socio-technical systems”, thus also assessing the social, political and economic institutions and contexts that science and technology is embedded in. She illustrated these insights with examples from her work, such as the societal dimensions of genetic testing or gene editing in agriculture. 

Dr. Dirnberger and Prof. Müller collaborate in a recent initiative to bring STS work to physics and explore its social, ethical, and political dimensions.   

About the award 

The Rudolf Kaiser Prize has been annually presented since 1989 to a young scientist for outstanding contributions in the field of experimental physics. It is named after the German physicist Rudolf Kaiser, who received his Habilitation at TUM in 1979. A prerequisite for receiving the award is that the recipient has not yet been appointed to a professorship. The award is granted by the Rudolf Kaiser Foundation in the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft (Donors' Association for the Promotion of Humanities and Sciences in Germany). The prize money is €30,000. 

Contact about the research 

• Florian Dirnberger’s research group Excitonic Quantum Materials at TUM https://www.exc-qumat.de/home 

Publication 

• Magneto-optics in a van der Waals magnet tuned by self-hybridized polaritons. F. Dirnberger, J. Quan, R. Bushati, G. Diederich, M. Florian, J. Klein, Z. Sofer, X. Xu, A. Kamra, A. Alù, V. M. Menon. Nature. doi: 10.1038/s41586-023-06275-2  

More information and links 

• Prof. Ruth Müller’s Chair of Science and Technology Policy at TUM https://www.sts.sot.tum.de/en/sts/research-groups/science-and-technology-policy/
• Alexey Chernikov, Chair of Ultrafast Microscopy and Photonics at the Dresden University of Technology https://tu-dresden.de/mn/physik/iap/photonics
• Clusters of Excellence BioSysteM and TransforM
• NAT Features: Dr. Florian Dirnberger https://www.nat.tum.de/nat/aktuelles/article/nat-features-dr-florian-dirnberger/ 

Press contact  

communications@nat.tum.de 
Team website