Prof. Dr. Peter Felfer

Atom Probe Tomography – Research Area A2

Peter Felfer took up his position as W1 Juniorprofessor of Atom Probe Tomography at the Institute I: General Materials Properties (WW1) in September 2015, and was sucessfully tenured in 2021.

Peter Felfer, born in Austria, was an early starter in the field of materials. He first came into contact with the matter in 1996 when he entered a school for higher vocational education (Höhere Technische Lehranstalt) in the Department of Materials Engineering. In 2001, after community service, he moved to the University of Leoben to study materials science and in parallel work at the Institute of Physical Metallurgy in the field of failure analysis. Entering his master thesis, he developed a strong interest in atomic scale materials characterization, working on the newly installed atom probe in the lab. This led him to pursue a PhD thesis in one of the leading institutions in the field, the Australian Centre of Microscopy and Microanalysis in Sydney, Australia under the supervision of Prof. J. Cairney and Prof. S. Ringer. In his PhD thesis, he developed new methods to access atomic scale information from a variety of structural and functional materials using the atom probe. After graduating, he shifted his focus towards giving an entirely new field of research access to atom probe tomography data: particle technology.

This research interest is a strong focus of the Felfer group at FAU within the coming years and is in excellent alignment with current research at EAM. In 2018, Peter Felfer received an ERC Starting Grant for his research on ‘Fundamentals of Hydrogen in Structural Metals at the Atomic Scale’.