Anne-Marie Kietzig

My research program is built on two fundamental pillars: one being surface wetting and the other being laser-material-interactions. Specific research projects target specifically at least one of the following aspects: (a) to investigate how femtosecond laser pulses influence the surface chemistry of materials, (b) to contribute a fundamental understanding of the physical phenomena governing surface wetting and (c) to use a femtosecond laser system for various applications as a high precision, microfabrication technique, which allows the fabrication of surface structures on two length scales (on the micro- and nanometer scale) in one process step. Recently we have shown that we are able to reduce ice adhesion by about 90% when designing microstructures for exploiting solidification dynamics of water. This finding is relevant to northern infrastructure, aircraft and turbines exposed to supercooled droplets and resulting ice accretion.