Marion Ash

Marion Asche (2013)

Marion Asche (born January 7, 1935 in Berlin ; † December 11, 2013 there ) was a German physicist and professor of solid state physics . She devoted herself in particular to research in the field of semiconductor physics and made pioneering achievements here .

Life

Marion Asche was born in Berlin as the child of Lisa Asche and her husband, the commercial instructor Werner Asche . The father had trained as a graphic designer and the mother as a fashion designer at the applied arts school in Magdeburg . Lisa Asche's father already worked at the arts and crafts school in Karlsruhe and later as a lithographer in Magdeburg . This artistic family background was for Marion Ash and her brother Peter R. Asche , who in Magdeburg control engineering at Heinrich Wilhelmi studied, a major influence on their continuing close relationship with the art.

In 1941 she started school in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, but just one year later, because of the bombing raids on Berlin, her mother, together with her daughter and son, who was born in 1940, relocated to Lauterbach near Putbus on the island of Rügen , so that she went to school in Putbus continued. In 1945 she returned to her apartment in East Berlin, but her father was a Soviet prisoner of war until 1950. He then got a job as a lecturer at the College for Advertising and Design in East Berlin, which he held until he retired.

Because of her good performance, Marion Asche came to the Käthe-Kollwitz-Oberschule in 1949, where she graduated from high school in 1953 with the grade “very good”.

Then she began studying physics at the Humboldt University of Berlin (HUB). From 1957 to 1959, Marion Asche carried out investigations on cadmium sulfide (CdS) crystals at the Institute for Solid State Research of the German Academy of Sciences (DAW) and received a physicist diploma from the HUB with the overall rating of “excellent” for her thesis on this topic .

Working as a semiconductor physicist in research

Marion Asche in the laboratory (1963)

She began working at the DAW in the fall of 1959 as a scientific assistant in the Physikalisch-Technische Institut (head: Robert Rompe ), which later became the Central Institute for Electron Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR . Here she met a group of distinguished scientists such as Klaus Thiessen and others, and she initially took on the task of researching the piezoresistance of various semiconductor materials such as p-germanium and others. For this purpose, she designed a special facility for carrying out her experiments and, after completion, carried out the long-term measurements and published the first scientific results as early as 1963.

Towards the end of 1963, Oleg Sarbey, who had a doctorate from Kiev, came to the Physics-Technical Institute as a visiting scientist . From that time until the end of her scientific career, Marion Asche worked very closely with the staff of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences . In 1964, Marion Asche spent six months in Kiev, where she was able to continue the experiments and theoretical considerations with her colleagues there. The collaboration proved to be very successful and at the end of 1965 she received her doctorate with a dissertation on “Hot Electrons in Silicon” at the HUB with “distinction”.

In the following period, the experimental and theoretical investigations of semiconductors in strong electrical fields were expanded. The published results found international recognition and formed the basis for her habilitation thesis . In 1970 Marion Asche received the academic degree Doctor sc. Nat. at the HUB.

In the course of ten years, Marion Asche, in cooperation with her Ukrainian colleagues, examined the phenomena of transport in strong electric and magnetic fields. These investigations led to a number of previously unobserved phenomena, and some results were included in textbooks, e.g. B. from the Seeger chair at the University of Vienna.

The inclusion of low temperatures in the measurements led Marion Asche in 1984 to the observation of a spontaneous symmetry breaking in the distribution of electrons in multi-valley semiconductors , which was previously predicted by the Kiev theorists and which is now known as discovery number 294 by the State Committee for Invention and Discovery of the Soviet Union was recognized and registered in 1986 (with priority from 1984). It was the first case of a physical discovery with the participation of German scientists at that time.

Marion ashes were therefore in 1987 for "outstanding scientific achievements in the field of semiconductor physics" by the president of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR (AdW) Werner Scheler to Professor appointed.

She expanded her interests in solid-state physics, and in cooperation with her Kiev colleagues she took part in studies of ballistic phonons , non-linear optical processes, cooling of electron-hole plasma in semiconductors and other contemporary topics in solid-state physics in the 1980s and 1990s Years. In the last part of her scientific activity her interest was devoted to the investigation of two-dimensional systems, where she also achieved significant results.

Marion Asche has published around 85 publications in international journals, two of which are review articles that have been cited by many specialists. She worked on three monographs that were published by the Naukowa Dumka publishing house in Kiev and the Springer publishing house in Heidelberg. She also wrote specialist articles for the ABC of Physics published by Brockhaus Verlag and for the Ukrainian encyclopedic dictionary. Her contributions to the history of the Physical Society in Berlin (PGzB) on the occasion of the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of the Berlin and thus the German Physical Society in 1995 are also noteworthy.

She was also the co-author of three patents. She has supervised numerous diploma and doctoral theses.

She received many invitations to give lectures at international conferences and in renowned institutions in the Federal Republic of Germany and abroad. Because of her outstanding achievements, she found international recognition and was invited to give lectures in France, Italy, Austria, Denmark, the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Germany even before German reunification .

Marion Asche not only worked closely with Ukrainian physicists. Although she was only able to hold sporadic discussions with physicists from the western world until 1989, after the opening of the border she worked intensively with English and West German scientists, and this also resulted in a number of joint scientific publications. These emerged in particular from the longstanding cooperation with the chairs of Frederick Koch at the Technical University of Munich and Eckehard Schöll at the Technical University of Berlin .

Characteristic of Marion Asche as a scientist was the all-round competence in the investigations she carried out - from grinding the samples, which she often did herself, to working theoretically on the results and writing down the research results and specialist articles.

From 1971 to 1979 she headed a working group for the investigation of hot electrons at the AdW and from December 1990 to 1992 she was head of the department for semiconductor transport at the Central Institute for Electron Physics at the AdW. She was also very active in founding the Paul Drude Institute for Solid State Electronics (PDI) (head: Klaus Ploog ) of the Leibniz Association in the course of reunification, where she worked until she retired in 2000.

Memberships and honors

• In 1972 she was one of the founders of the International Conference “Hot Electrones in Semiconductors” (HCIS).
• She worked on program and advisory committees of international conferences and other bodies.
• From 1991 to 2000 Marion Asche was a member of the board of the German Physical Society (DPG) ,
• From 1991 to 1998 she was a member of the board of the Physikalische Gesellschaft zu Berlin (PGzB) .
• From 1994 to 1996 she worked as chairwoman of the Physical Society in Berlin, then until 1998 as deputy chairwoman. She was the first woman to head one of the oldest scientific organizations (founded in 1845), to which many well-known physicists were close, such as Nobel Prize winners Albert Einstein , Erwin Schrödinger , Werner Heisenberg and others
• Her scientific achievements were recognized by the "Prize of the President of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR for excellence" in 1972.
• Award for her discovery in 1984
• In the following years her achievements were confirmed with three further 1st prizes from the Ukrainian Academy Institute.

Private life

Marion Asche, Oleg Sarbey (2013)

When "perestroika" emerged in the Soviet Union (SU) at the end of the 1980s and she was better informed about it through her knowledge of the circumstances in the SU, she considered it important to inform the staff of the institute about it in as much detail as possible.

She donated the money she received in 1986 for the previously mentioned award for her discovery in the SU for the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine.

Marion Asche married the Kiev semiconductor physicist and professor Oleg Sarbey in 2005 , with whom she had been connected since 1965.

Publications (selection)

• On the question of the mobility of the hot electrons in silicon. physica status solidi (b). Vol. 7, 1964, p. 339 (with Oleg G. Sarbey).
• Hot electrons in n-silicon. Dissertation, Humboldt University Berlin, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, 1965.
• Piezoresistance of p-germanium. physica status solidi (b). Vol. 18, H. 2, 1966, pp. 749-754 (with Oleg G. Sarbey and VM Vasetskii).
• Electric conductivity of hot carriers in Si and Ge. physica status solidi (b). Vol. 33, H. 9, 1969, review article (with Oleg G. Sarbey).
• Transport processes in n-silicon. Habilitation thesis, Humboldt University Berlin, Physics Section 1970.
• Non-Even Dependence of Conductivity of Hot Electrons on Magnetic Field Strength in Many-Valley Semiconductors. physica status solidi (b). Vol. 52, 1972, p. 707 (with Oleg G. Sarbey and JG Savyalow).
• A New Type of Galvanomagnetic Effect for Hot Electrons in Many-Valley Semiconductors. Solid State Communication. Vol. 21, 1977, p. 751 (with K. Papunaschwili and Oleg G. Sarbey).
• Experimental Proof of the Multivalued Sasaki Effect in n-Si. J. Phys. C, Sol. State Phys., Vol. 13, 1980, p. 645 (with H. Kostial and Oleg G. Sarbey).
• Stratification of a Transverse Field in Many-Valley Semiconductors. So V. Phys. JETF, Vol. 54, 1981, p. 715 (with others).
• Electron-Phonon Interaction in Si. physica status solidi (b). Vol. 103, H. 11, 1981. Review article (with Oleg G. Sarbey).
• Hot electrons in multi-valley semiconductors. Monograph, Russian. Publishing house Naukova dumka, Kiev 1982 (with ZS Gribnikov, VV Mitin and Oleg G. Sarbey).
• The Role of Electron-Hole Interaction in Cooling Process of Highly Exited Carriers. physica status solidi (b). Vol. 126, 1984, p. 607 (with Oleg G. Sarbey).
• Multivalued Distribution of Hot Electrons between Equivalent Valleys. In: Monograph “Hot Electrons in Semiconductors”. Topics in Applied Physics, Vol. 58.Springer Verlag, Heidelberg 1985.
• Hot electron transport in semiconductors. Ed. by L. Reggiani. Springer-Verlag, Berlin; Heidelberg; New York; Tokyo 1985, ISBN 3-540-13321-6 .
• Investigation of Nonequilibrium Phonons in GaAs. physica status solidi (b). Vol. 136, 1986, p. 63 (with others).
• Multivalued Hot Electron Distribution as Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking. Sol. State Electronics. Vol. 32, 1989, p. 1633.
• Phase Coherence of the Electrons in Delta-Doped GaAs. Superlattices and Microstructures. Vol. 10, 1991, p. 425 (with others).
• Self-Induced Birefringence of Infrared Light in n-Ge. Phys. Rev. Lett. Vol. 71, 1993, p. 3027 (with others).
• Hot Electrons and Nonequilibrum Phonons in Multiple Delta-Doped GaAs. In: “Hot Carriers in Semiconductors” Edited by K. Hess et al. Plenum Press, New York 1996 (with others).
• The DX center formation at high electric fields in planar-doped GaAs: Si. Physica Vol. 788, 2001, pp. 308-310 (with Oleg G. Sarbey).
• Quantum-Well Reshaping by Hot Electrons in Planar-Doped Structures. Phys. Rev. Vol. 66, 2002, p. 2333 (with Oleg G. Sarbey).

literature

• Horst Nelkowski (Ed.): Einstein Symposion, Berlin, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birthday, March 25-30, 1979. Organizer: The Senator for Science and Research. Springer Verlag, Berlin; Heidelberg; New York 1979, ISBN 3-540-09718-X .
• Horst Nelkowski: The Physical Society of Berlin in the years after the Second World War.
• Robert Rompe , Hans-Jürgen Treder , Werner Ebeling : On the great Berlin physics - Lectures at the annual conference 1987 of the Physical Society of the GDR in the anniversary year 750 years of Berlin. Teubner Verlag, Leipzig 1987, ISBN 3-322-00487-2 .
• Klaus Thiessen and Eckehard Schöll: Obituary for Marion Asche. Physik Journal, Weinheim, vol. 13, no. 4, 2014, p. 56.