Ulrich Eckern's 60th birthday

Ulrich Eckern began studying physics in 1970 at the TU Dortmund. He was one of the – few – first-generation physics students at this new university, who compensated for the lack of established student life by intensive interactions with the new professors and assistants (like me), well-developed social contacts, and memorable parties. For his diploma thesis and PhD work Ulli joined the group of Albert Schmid and moved with him to Karlsruhe University in 1976. Topics of Ulli’s early work were, e.g., nonequilibrium superconductivity such as charge imbalance relaxation processes, investigated in a collaboration with John Clarke and Mike Tinkham [1], and the stability of nonequilibrium states in driven systems [2]. Similar phenomena in superfluid 3He were studied in his PhD thesis [3], which he defended in 1979 with the degree ‘summa cum laude’. Soon thereafter Ulli moved for two years to Cornell University to work as postdoc with Vinay Ambegaokar. Together we explored dissipative effects in macroscopic quantum mechanical systems, specifically the influence of quasiparticle tunneling on the quantum dynamics of low-capacitance Josephson junctions [4]. For the next few years, dissipation and relaxation processes were the central issue of Ulli’s work back in Karlsruhe, with further applications to superconductors, chargedensity wave systems [5], solitons, Ulrich Eckern (Photo by U. Eckern, 2007)