The Collaborative Research Center SFB 1083 of the DFG was established at Philipps-Universität Marburg in 2013. More than 80 chemists and physicists jointly investigate solid/solid interfaces of a variety of organic and inorganic materials in order to achieve a detailed microscopic understanding of the chemical bonding, the electronic coupling, and the dynamics of energy transfer for model systems of different classes of heterointerfaces.

 

Since 2017 the SFB includes groups from the Universities of Gießen and Münster and the Jülich Research Center.

We aim at understanding electronic states at the interface between different semiconducting low-dimensional materials (e.g., molecular crystals or transition metal dichalcogenides) or between such materials and a (noble) metal. Employing a combination of density-functional theory, van der Waals interaction, and many-body perturbation theory, all relevant physical mechanisms (chemical bonds, physisorption, electrostatic interaction, dielectric screening, image-potential effects, etc.) are correctly included. Challenges are given by, e.g. the role of material thickness or the spatial decay of interface states in the normal direction. In the lateral dimension, dispersive bands as well as local, non-dispersive states may occur, depending on the competition between interaction within each material and hybridization across the interface.