Michael Allan Physics and Chemistry with Free Electrons

Retired

It seems like yesterday that I arrived in Fribourg at the age of 30 - and now I am retired!

I was very privileged being allowed to do, throughout my career, what was my dream already as a school kid - study encounters of free electrons with molecules. And I loved teaching and doing research with graduate students!

And, thanks to a number of kind colleagues around the world, my contact with science is not yet lost entirely — see the News on the right.

And, my most valued colleague, friend and mentor Hartmut Hotop wrote a most kind Editorial in the Eur. Phys. J. D at the occasion of my retirement, which in a touching way celebrates my and my coworkers’ research achievements (which were quite often in collaboration with him) — an Editorial titled Michael Allan - electron impact spectroscopy at its best.

What more can I wish for?

News

• I delivered a lecture at the (virtual) 73rd annual Gaseous Electronics Conference. of the Americal Physical Society (APS) on 7. October 2020.
  My friend Tom Miller kindly recorded it and put it onto YouTube.
  A higher resolved version recorded by the conference is at the GEC website. (Click "watch again". Unfortunalely, it requires APS login.)
• See a foto of the NeoWise comet above Fribourg, the Green Ray, and the close approach of Jupiter and Saturn!
  (Under the "Hobby photos" tab)
• To my great delight I was awarded the 2020 Will Allis Prize of the Americal Physical Society.
• I presented a lecture (see this website under "Research Lectures") at the DAMOP meeting, planned in Portland, Oregon, which took place virtually because of the Corona virus epidemy. (My admiration goes to the organizers, everything went smoothly despite the vey short notice!)
• I attended the Telluride Workshop “Advances in theory of electronic resonances” in July 2019, with a talk on 2-dimensional spectroscopy. Thanks to Anna Krylov, Ksenia Bravaya and Thomas Jagau for inviting me.
• I co-authored a paper in J. Chem. Phys., together with Petr Čársky and Roman Čurík. The paper has been selected as a 2019 Editor’s Choice article. As such, you can download it for free from JCP during all 2020.
• I co-authored a paper in PCCP, together with M. Lacko, P. Papp, Š. Matejčík, M. Zlatar, I. I. Fabrikant, J. Kočišek and Juraj Fedor.
• And the best: My instruments were not scrapped, but are operated in the most qualified manner by Juraj Fedor and his group in Prague. They already have, among many other publications, a paper in Phys. Rev. Letters!

Nature has talent for art - does the pattern below, revealed by two-dimensional spectroscopy, not have an estetically pleasing value?