With liquid crystals and their thermodynamic properties, Manfred Eich began his scientific career in the 1980s. A career he spent for 29 years at the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH), more precisely at the Institute of Optical and Electronic Materials, which he also headed since 2013. On September 30, 2025, the physicist retired. However, this is more of a formal milestone than a direct one, as he remains closely connected to TUHH – both with his institute and with the new excellence cluster BlueMat.
Structural colors like those in butterflies
"From the nano- to the macroscale, we worked with artificially structured materials that exhibit special electronic and optical properties," Manfred Eich explains his research. Also in the Collaborative Research Center 986 of the German Research Foundation, for which he was active as co-spokesperson, board member, and head of one of the three research areas for twelve years, the goal was to realize properties through structuring rather than by the use of chemical elements. "With so-called structural colors, an approach borrowed from nature, we were able to attract attention," Eich explains the phenomenon in which color effects are generated by structuring inherently colorless materials, as is also the case in butterflies and opals.
With the long-term goal of his materials research to develop non-toxic and sustainable material systems, Prof. Eich counts among the substantive pioneers for BlueMat, the Cluster of Excellence won by TU Hamburg, which aims to achieve resource-efficient and climate-friendly solutions by incorporating water into structured material systems.
Pattern recognition of coins
As a pioneer of nonlinear optical organic materials, which are relevant, among other things, for ultrafast modulators in optical communication technology, Eich attracted international attention from the late 1980s onward. Other research highlights of his career included work on high-temperature-resistant structures, photonic crystal waveguides, the photoelectric conversion of sunlight into electricity using metallic nanostructures, or quite pragmatically: the optical pattern recognition of coins, which detects the relief within milliseconds and thus distinguishes a genuine coin from a counterfeit.
In addition to his research and teaching, Eich worked for 20 years as a management consultant at McKinsey and for large industrial companies. As appealing as he found the support of renowned clients and major industrial projects, he always gave priority to science. A similar attitude was likely true regarding calls over the past three decades – to universities in Germany, the USA, and Australia – Manfred Eich remained loyal to research at TU Hamburg.
