First of all, it is a pleasure to thank Prof. Dr.
Günter Gauglitz for giving me the opportunity to do my Ph.D. at the Institute
of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry (IPTC) at the University of Tübingen. The
excellent working conditions, the topic of my research and the opportunities to
participate in several international conferences and meetings were all made
available by Prof. Gauglitz forming the basis of this work.
I wish to thank PD Dr. Udo Weimar from the University
of Tübingen for his willingness to serve as second reviewer for this thesis.
I would like to express my thanks to Prof. Dr.
Johann Gasteiger from the University of Erlangen for reviewing this thesis as
third referee.
This work would not exist without many colleagues
working with the different devices and generating all data analyzed in this thesis.
I would like to thank my colleagues Dr. Birgit Kieser and Stefan Busche for the
measurements by the SPR setup. I want to express my thanks to my colleagues
Carmen Betsch, Maura Kasper, Georg Belge, Dirk Nopper and Matthias Vollprecht for
the measurements using different RIfS setups. I want to say thank you to Dr. Sabine
Reder who performed uncountable measurements using a TIRF setup. I would like
to thank my coworkers Sevinal Altundal, Julia Fischer, Birgit Gaiser, Britt
Schuster, Markus Hofmann and Michael Zatloukal for their tireless help and
support.
I am deeply indebted to all my colleagues of the
Gauglitz group for their help, the lively discussions and the great ambience. It
was a pleasure to work in the "Verfügungsgebäude" thanks to Dr. Udo
Weimar and his group who established an excellent working atmosphere.
I would like to express my thanks to Fred Reiner
Rapp who made his powerful yet easy to use programs "Nemo" and
"Solves" available. He never got tired of implementing all more or
less useful features of my wish lists. I would like to thank Jürgen Mitschele
for proof reading the spelling of this work.
The EC and the BMBF are acknowledged for the financial
support (projects "AWACSS" and "VERN").
Last but not least, I would like to thank my
family, in particular my parents, who enabled my studies and who gave me the
support necessary during the last years.
Ph. D. Thesis