The prestigious journal Physical Review Letters (published by the American Physical Society) publishes around 2,500 letters each year on important findings in fundamental research in all areas of physics. At the end of each year, a collection of the best publications of the year, opens an external URL in a new window is also published – and a paper by TU Wien authors is part of this 63-part collection.

In a collaboration between the IAP (Anna Niggas, Richard Wilhelm, Wolfgang Werner) and the Institute for Theoretical Physics (Maosheng Hao, Joachim Burgdörfer, and Florian Libisch), the secondary electron emission of graphene and graphite was investigated. This led to the identification of “doorway states” that influence the energy spectrum of the emitted electrons. A detailed explanation of the selected work can be found in the TU Wien press release.