The project is part of the Villum Foundation’s special program Villum Experiment, which supports bold and innovative ideas within the natural and technical sciences.

This year, the Villum Experiment program has funded 52 unconventional research projects, all selected through an anonymous peer-review process. In this process, the originality and potential of the idea are prioritized over the researcher’s CV – creating space for the unexpected and the untested.

In his project, Brian Julsgaard will explore how high-energy electrons behave and relax in wide-bandgap materials. When an electron is excited across the bandgap, its high energy can trigger a complex, multi-path relaxation back to the ground state – for example, through photon emission, lattice deformation, or trapping in metastable states. Each of these electron pathways leaves a distinct "fingerprint" in optical, laser-based measurements.

The project aims to develop an experimental technique that is both ultra-fast and ultra-broadband, capable of simultaneously tracking the temporal evolution of these electron pathways. Using calculations based on density functional theory, the research will provide insight into the atomic-scale nature of each pathway. Together, these techniques have the potential to deliver significant new fundamental understanding of excited wide-bandgap materials – with possible applications in optimizing technologies such as radiation detection and dosimetry.

The Department of Physics and Astronomy congratulates Brian on receiving this important grant for innovative research.

Read more about this years' Villum Experiment grant recipients here