Many thanks go to my supervisors Dres. Lenny Rivkin and Michael Böge who helped me so much during these last four months. I appreciated their kind and motivating suggestions as well as their questions and criticism. I could always count on their support which has been very helpful for me in order to conclude this thesis.
I would also like to thank Dres. Andreas Streun, Marc Muñoz, Micha Dehler, Miroslav Dach, Thomas Schmidt, Werner Portmann and Andreas Lüdeke for their advice and helpful explanations. My thanks also go to Peter Hottinger, Andreas Jaggi and Dr. Trivan Pal for their support of my experiments during our night shifts.
Finally many thanks to the whole team at SLS for a terrific time at their lab, for the good working climate and all those great moments. This has been a very interesting and fun experience and I will always gladly look back on this period of my graduate studies at ETH.