Since the late 1980s he has been an author and coauthor of over 300 peer-reviewed articles, the most popular of which, called "'Trapped rainbow' storage of light in metamaterials", was cited more than 400 times.
From 1995 to 2003 he was post-doc at both Edinburgh and Marburg Universities following by becoming faculty staff at the Institute of Technical Physics in Stuttgart, Germany in 1997.
[10] With conventional dielectric materials, having a positive refractive index, it is impossible to ‘stop’ travelling light signals completely, not least because of the presence of structural disorder.
[10] This was an important observation, which Hess made from his extensive studies of slow light in semiconductor quantum dots[11][12] and the dynamics of their spontaneous emission close to the stopped-light point in photonic crystals.
Algorithms and codes developed in his group run on high-performance parallel computers and have been used to elucidate a rich variety of aspects of modern nano-physics ranging from the definition of temperature in nanoscale systems,[17] to optimisation of ultrashort pulses in experimentally realised quantum-dot semiconductor optical amplifiers.