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In presenting the crimes of SS-guards through the medium of an illiterate woman, Schlink's novel Der Vorleser (1995) attracted a mainly stern critical response. The much-criticised one-sided portrayal of destructive obedience seems to be addressed by his next novel Die Heimkehr (2006), where submission to malevolent authority is transferred to an intellectual platform set in America in the years following World War II. Although Schlink maintains he did not intend Die Heimkehr as a sequel to Der Vorleser, there are several thematic aspects linking the two novels. Both have a male German narrator, who was born around the end of World War II and has close links with a former Nazi collaborator. At the centre of both novels is Schlink's portrayal of the nature of obedience to authority, uncovering the reality of man's divided nature that consists in both good and evil. Destructive obedience is portrayed in both novels rather one-sidedly, either as a problem of a lack of education, or as a discussion on an intellectual level. It therefore seems justified to read Der Vorleser and Die Heimkehr in chronological order to arrive at a more realistic picture of obedience to authority. In Die Heimkehr, Schlink's authority figure is an American University professor who uses Stanley Milgram's (1960's) study series of obedience to authority for his own questionable purposes. Schlink therefore provides within the plot itself a theoretical approach to analyse this novel. The examination of Schlink's portrayal of authority and obedience reveals that Der Vorleser and Die Heimkehr when read as independent works, do not address the universal dilemma of submission to malevolent authority. However, an analysis of Schlink's earlier novel Der Vorleser, based on Milgram's theories, uncovers surprising parallels with Die Heimkehr even though, as Schlink has stated, the novels are not connected. This dissertation draws upon Milgram's study to uncover and examine the relationship between authority and obedience in Schlink's novels to show how atrocities come about. The study provides a paradigm for analysing the protagonists of Der Vorleser and Die Heimkehr based on Milgram's obedience study, which, as yet, has not been consulted for an analysis of Schlink's novels. Read in sequence however, using Milgram's theories, Der Vorleser and Die Heimkehr can be shown to complement each other and confirm that Schlink views obedience to destructive authority as a permanent and universal problem.

Dynamics of nonradiative excitons with large in-plane wave vectors forming a so-called reservoir is experimentally studied in a high-quality semiconductor structure containing a 14-nm shallow GaAs/Al$_{0.03}$Ga$_{0.97}$As quantum well by means of the non-degenerate pump-probe spectroscopy. The exciton dynamics is visualized via the dynamic broadening of the heavy-hole and light-hole exciton resonances caused by the exciton-exciton scattering. Under the non-resonant excitation free carriers are optically generated. In this regime the exciton dynamics is strongly affected by the exciton-carrier scattering. In particular, if the carriers of one sign are prevailing, they efficiently deplete the reservoir of the nonradiative excitons inducing their scattering into the light cone. A simple model of the exciton dynamics is developed, which considers the energy relaxation of photocreated electrons and holes, their coupling into excitons, and exciton scattering into the light cone. The model well reproduces the exciton dynamics observed experimentally both at the resonant and nonresonant excitation. Moreover, it correctly describes the profiles of the photoluminescence pulses studied experimentally. The efficient exciton-electron interaction is further experimentally verified by the control of the exciton density in the reservoir when an additional excitation creates electrons depleting the reservoir., Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures

Unique structural and optical properties of atomically thin transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) enable in principle their efficient coupling to photonic cavities having the optical mode volume below the diffraction limit. So far, this has only been demonstrated by coupling TMDs with plasmonic modes in metallic nano-structures, which exhibit strong energy dissipation limiting their potential applications in devices. Here, we present an alternative approach for realisation of ultra-compact cavities interacting with two-dimensional semiconductors: we use mono- and bilayer TMD WSe$_2$ coupled to low-loss high-refractive-index gallium phosphide (GaP) nano-antennas. We observe a photoluminescence (PL) enhancement exceeding 10$^4$ compared with WSe$_2$ placed on the planar GaP, and trace its origin to a combination of enhancement of the spontaneous light emission rate, favourable modification of the PL directionality and enhanced optical excitation efficiency, all occurring as a result of WSe$_2$ coupling with strongly confined photonic modes of the nano-antennas. Further effect of the coupling is observed in the polarisation dependence of WSe$_2$ PL, and in the Raman scattering signal enhancement exceeding 10$^3$. Our findings reveal high-index dielectric nano-structures as a promising platform for engineering light-matter coupling in two-dimensional semiconductors.

The flow cytometric detection of aberrant antigen expression is one method proposed for the quantification of minimal residual disease (MRD) in acute leukemias. The present study was designed to investigate the stability of the aberrant antigen expression at relapse or at treatment failure of initial chemotherapy. For this purpose, multiparameter immunophenotyping with a panel of 15 monoclonal antibodies was used at diagnosis as well as at relapse (43 patients with overall 65 aberrations) and at treatment failure (35 patients with overall 66 aberrations). There was a significant decrease in the percentage of the initially described aberrant antigen expression on leukemia blasts at relapse (P = 0.001; n = 65) as well as at treatment failure (P = 0.0001; n = 66) considering all aberrations in the whole leukemia population. Concerning only patients with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML), significant decreases in the aberrant expression could be detected at relapse (P = 0.031; n = 42) and at treatment failure (P = 0.0001; n = 52). The changes in patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) were significant only at relapse (P = 0.006; n = 23). Initially, the most informative aberration was not detectable in four patients at relapse and in seven patients at treatment failure. A decrease of under 50% of the initial value was observed in another 8 patients at relapse and in 10 patients at treatment failure. In further studies assessing the detection of aberrant antigen expression for MRD, quantification of the relapses should be explicitly analyzed regarding the persistence of the initially described aberrant antigen expression. Cytometry (Comm. Clin. Cytometry) 42:247–253, 2000. © 2000 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

We present investigations on the coherence of the emission from the polarization split fundamental mode of an AlGaInAs/GaAs quantum-dot microcavity laser. Using polarization insensitive measurements of the first-order field-correlation function $g^{(1)}(\tau)$ we determine the power-dependent degree of polarization. Whereas the orthogonally-polarized components of the fundamental mode exhibit comparable strength below the lasing threshold, a degree of linear polarization of 0.99 is observed in the coherent regime. This is also observed for increasing temperatures up to 77K. Furthermore, by measuring $g^{(1)}(\tau)$ for both modes separately the stronger mode is found to reveal a record coherence time of 20ns. Finally, based on a theoretical model it is possible to fully characterize the cavity emission in terms of first- and second-order coherence using auxiliary data from $g^{(2)}(\tau)$ measurements performed with a recently developed streak camera technique., Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures

Lysine is proposed as an alternative biosynthetic precursor of the pyrrole-imidazole alkaloids frequently found in marine sponges. As a putative key intermediate, the natural product N-alpha-(4-bromopyrrolyl-2-carbonyl)-L-homoarginine (1) from the sponge Agelas wiedenmayeri was synthesized in the solid phase starting from the Fmoc/Pmc-protected L-homoarginine and in solution starting from readily available L-lysine methyl ester.

We report experiments on the production of ultracold neutrons (UCN) in a converter of superfluid helium coated with fluorinated grease. We employed our technique of window-free extraction of accumulated UCN from the helium, in which they were produced by downscattering neutrons of a cold beam from the Munich research reactor. The time constant for UCN passage through the same extraction aperture as in a previous experiment was a factor two shorter, despite a lower mean velocity of the accumulated UCN in the present experiments. A time-of-flight measurement of the cold neutron spectrum incident on the converter allowed us to estimate the multi-phonon contribution to the UCN production. The UCN production rate inferred from two methods agrees with the theoretical expectation., 11 pages, 6 figures