Alumna Ziyao Tang receives the Friedrich Hund Dissertation Prize 2023

This prize is awarded by the Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation to theses that are characterized by outstanding scientific content, particular originality of the solutions and excellent presentation. As part of the event "The Dean informs", former IAP doctoral student Ziyao Tang can take home the award.

Impressive Achievement

Prof. Gross, doctoral supervisor of the award winner, describes the excellence of the candidate: "A great result of her research is that the last two of her publications in the renowned journal 'Optics Express' received a very positive response in the scientific community and were described in review articles as groundbreaking in this field of work. Considering that she completed her doctorate in less than 3 years and during this short period of time the corona pandemic also occurred, this is an excellent achievement!"

Research scope and output

The award-winning dissertation entitled "Improved correction methods for symmetry-free systems" deals with symmetry-free optical systems, which have gained a great deal of interest in research and industry in recent years. The abandonment of symmetry has brought with it a multitude of problems and has made it particularly necessary to expand the traditionally existing approaches, tools and methods for design, optimization and quality assessment or even to develop completely new ones. Ms. Tang has addressed these issues in her research and has opened up important new avenues, especially for the understanding and quality assessment of corresponding generalized systems, and proposed methods that have brought crucial advantages and insights for successful development. The basis for this was her good understanding of the effect of a free-form surface within the system for the correction of image errors.

Ms Tang also addresses a second important problem of free-form systems: the rapidly increasing number of degrees of freedom for arbitrarily shaped surfaces usually leads to difficulties in practical optimization work because the underlying merit function takes on complex shapes and becomes high-dimensional.

In order to create better conditions here, the researcher first applied a novel optimization method borrowed from biology, the so-called ant-colony algorithm. She then further developed and adapted this and finally tested an approach to accelerate the algorithm by orders of magnitude by not only basing the path decisions on random numbers, but also using known knowledge and basic rules from optical design and the correction of image errors to steer them in sensible directions. The result is a new type of knowledge-based algorithm that is able to create a complete design at the touch of a button in simple cases.

Honour

In summary, Ms. Ziyao Tang has achieved extremely far-reaching results in her dissertation, which are not only of great importance in the scientific but also in particular in the application-oriented environment.

Her commitment to the supervision of lecture seminars and student work, which went far beyond what was required, was also recognized.

Background

Dr. Ziyao Tang studied at the Harbin Institute of Technology in China and came to Jena in 2016 after completing her bachelor's degree to obtain a master's degree at the Abbe School of Photonics. From 2019-2022, she completed her doctorate in "Optical system Design" and has been an Optical System Engineer at Carl Zeiss Jena since then.