Ph.D. Profile: Freja Liebach Guttesen

The idea of Freja’s Ph.D. project is to develop a microscopic pump made up of a so-called chiral molecule. A screw-shaped molecule acts as a windmill that begins to rotate when it is exposed to wind. On a molecular level, a current can act as a wind. If a windmill is forcefully started on a windless day, the rotation generates a wind. In the molecular analogue, can a rotating chiral molecule generate a current? This is one of the questions she is trying to answer in her Ph.D. The project is a part of an international collaboration, where she is contributing to the theoretical understanding of the experiments that are conducted at the Weizmann Institute in Israel.