Graduate physicist Prof. Tilman Pfau, born 1965, completed his PhD in 1994 under Prof. J. Mlynek in Konstanz. After temporary residencies in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), he was promoted to professor in 1998 at Konstanz University. Receiving the Feodor-Lynen scholarship, he researched at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in Boston in 1999. In 2000, he became a full professor and founded a new institute at the University of Stuttgart. His focus is on atomic, molecular, and optical physics with the aim to control, and understand new phenomena in interacting quantum systems. In 2008, the Optical Society of America (OSA) accepted him as a Fellow for his “…pioneering work in the field of atomic optics and cool quantum gases…“. In 2026 he became an Elected Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Notable awards include two Advanced Investigator Grants from the European Research Council (2010, 2021), the Herbert P. Broida Prize (2017), the Gentner-Kastler Prize (2014) and Rudolf-Kaiser Prize by the Association for the Promotion of Science and Humanities in Germany (1998).

       Atoms with a highly excited electron, called Rydberg atoms, can form unusual types of molecular bonds. The bond differs from the well-known ionic and covalent bonds not only by its binding mechanism, but also by its bond length ranging up to several micrometers. We report the observation a new type of molecular bond based on the interaction between the ionic charge and a flipping induced dipole of a Rydberg atom with a bond length of several micrometers. We measure the vibrational spectrum and spatially resolve the bond length and the angular alignment of the molecule using a high-resolution ion microscope. As a consequence of the large bond length, the molecular dynamics is slow and can be directly observed under the microscope. These results pave the way for future studies of spatio-temporal effects in molecular dynamics, e.g., beyond Born- Oppenheimer physics, and more generally on (ionic) impurities in quantum gases.