2020

Research will establish time-resolved spectroscopy of photo-induced electron dynamics CFEL researcher Andrea Trabattoni from DESY has successfully applied for a Helmholtz Young Investigator Group ... Laser-matter interactions offer a plethora of possibilities to understand and manipulate matter with help of light. One of the ultimate aims is to include light-nucleus interactions in these studies ...

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The search for new, super-efficient materials to harvest solar energy is a major research focus around the world. Until now, silicon has been the material of choice for solar cells – but ... The work has just been published in  the current issue of Science Advances. The researchers came from the MPSD and the ...

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Henry Chapman, DESY Lead Scientist and Professor at the University of Hamburg will receive the Gregori Aminoff Prize for Crystallography 2021 from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. ... Most processes in cells and organisms are controlled by proteins, making them the target of nearly all therapeutic drugs. The crystals that can be formed by proteins can diffract X-rays, allowing ...

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A team of researchers at CFEL has reached an important milestone on the road to the particle accelerator of the future. For the first time, a so-called laser plasma accelerator has run for more than ... Physicists hope that the technique of laser plasma acceleration will lead to a new generation of powerful and compact particle accelerators offering unique properties for a wide range of ...

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An international team, with scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT Boston), Politecnico di Milano, University of Hamburg and CFEL/DESY, has synthesized ultrashort and ... The particular approach to "sub-cycle" waveform synthesis pursued here relies on a process called "optical parametric amplification", that allows to generate ultrashort ...

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In recent years two-dimensional quantum materials have provided a platform for the realization of novel correlated and topological phases of matter. In a paper just published in the current issue ... In their search for new materials which can conduct electricity without any resistance, the so-called superconductors, many scientists now investigate two-dimensional materials to advance their ...

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Magnetic materials have been a mainstay in computing technology due to their ability to permanently store information in their magnetic state. Current technologies are based on ferromagnets, whose ... The strength and direction of a magnet’s “north pole” is denoted by its so-called magnetization. In ferromagnets, this easily reversible magnetization can represent a ...

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X-ray lasers can reveal the spatial structures of biomolecules that are hard to come by with other methods. However, the intense X-ray flashes vaporize the samples almost immediately. An ... The spatial structure of proteins tells scientists how these biomolecules work and how they might be targeted by drugs. To resolve the structure, researchers X-ray small crystals grown from the ...

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X-ray single particle imaging (SPI) is a technique where the very bright X-ray pulses produced by XFELs are used to image single particles like biomolecules. When the laser beam is ‘shot’ ... Holographic references are one way to significantly improve the efficiency of SPI experiments. A holographic reference is something that is in close proximity to the target particle and whose ...

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Imaging the structure of a molecule and capturing its dynamics during a chemical reaction with atomic resolution and in real time is one of the holy grails for unravelling chemistry. An ... “Understanding exactly how chemical reactions proceed can not only advance our fundamental insight into the dynamics of matter, it may also help us to design better or completely new chemical ...

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The Royal Society has elected CFEL researcher Henry Chapman as a Fellow. The leading DESY scientist is a pioneer of lensless imaging using X-ray lasers and has provided previously unattainable ... Katharina Fegebank, Hamburg's Second Mayor and Senator for Science, Research and Equality congratulated: “My warmest congratulations to Henry Chapman! It is a great honor for our city to ...

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With the help of DESY's X-ray light source PETRA III, a research team has identified several candidates for possible active substances that bind to an important protein of the coronavirus ... An important starting point in the search for an effective drug against the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is to stop its multiplication in the host's body: Viruses cannot replicate on their own. To do ...

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Review by 18 leading researchers from 16 institutions (also from CFEL) in the current issue of Science ... Given the importance of this problem, photosynthesis has been extensively investigated with numerous theoretical and experimental tools over the past three decades. The energy transfer and motion ...

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Daria Gorelova takes up the post of a newly created Assistant Professorship with the focus on “Seeing excitons in motion” at the University of Hamburg starting from 1 April 2020. The ... When a semiconductor interacts with light, an electron can be brought to a higher energy level leaving a positive charge behind. The electron can attract to this charge and build a bound pair called ...

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A team of DESY scientists has built a miniature double particle accelerator that can recycle some of the laser energy used to boost the energy of the accelerated electrons a second time. The device ... The miniature size of the device is possible due to the short wavelength of terahertz radiation. “Terahertz-based accelerators have emerged as promising candidates for next-generation compact ...

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An international team of researchers from Switzerland, Germany (partly based at CFEL), and Great Britain has uncovered an anomalous metallic behavior in an otherwise insulating ceramic material. The ... The condensed-matter physics world was shaken up when high-temperature superconductivity was reported in a copper oxide material in 1986 by Alex Müller and Georg Bednorz. Their discovery not only ...

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Understanding the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life, is essential to obtain insight into their biological function. Due to their minute size and extreme fragility, these structures ... For decades, researchers from many fields such as physics, biology, and biochemistry have poured their creativity into circumventing the radiation-damage conundrum. Current approaches include the use ...

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Researchers from the MPSD at CFEL and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in the United States have discovered a significant new fundamental kind of quantum electronic oscillations, or ... Almost seventy years ago, scientists showed that electrons in materials could sustain wavelike propagating oscillations, known as plasmons. Nowadays, there is a vibrant field of plasmonics which ...

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Francesca Calegari leading scientist at CFEL and professor at the Universität Hamburg is vice chair of a new EU-funded international network on attosecond chemistry.  The aim of the AttoChem ... The new AttoChem network will internationally coordinate the experimental and theoretical efforts to exploit the large potential of attosecond techniques in chemistry. “We expect the recent ...

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The new “Helmholtz-Lund International Graduate School” (HELIOS) is intended to create educational opportunities for doctoral students in Hamburg and Lund to prepare them for a new age in ... HELIOS will run for a total of 22 doctoral positions over two three-year periods. The international school is funded by the three partner institutions as well as by the Helmholtz Association of ...

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With an advanced X-ray combination technique, scientists have traced nanocarriers for tuberculosis drugs within cells with very high precision. The method combines two sophisticated scanning X-ray ... “Metals play key roles in numerous biological processes, from the oxygen transport in our red blood cells and the mineralization of bones to the detrimental accumulation of metals in nerve ...

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Using ultra-bright X-ray flashes, a team of researchers has tracked down a potential target for new drugs against sleeping sickness: The scientists have decoded the detailed spatial structure of a ... Sleeping sickness (African trypanosomiasis) is a tropical disease caused by the parasite Trypanosoma brucei, which is transmitted by the bite of tsetse flies, that inhabit much of tropical ...

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This year's European Innovation Award on Synchrotron Radiation goes to CFEL physicist Heinz Graafsma together with Aldo Mozzanica and Bernd Schmitt from the Paul Scherrer Institute in ... For experiments on storage rings, so-called photon counting pixel detectors are usually used, since the photons arrive one after the other in each pixel, and the signal of each photon is processed ...

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Using extremely short X-ray flashes, an international team of researchers has for the first time ever observed details of the ultrafast chemical reaction leading to the formation of aggressive ... In the radiolysis of water, high-energy radiation first knocks an electron out of a water molecule (H₂O), thereby ionizing it to H₂O⁺. This is followed by a so-called ...

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Discovering ways to control the topological aspects of quantum materials is an important research frontier because it can lead to desirable electrical and spin transport properties for future device ... In topological materials, electrons experience a twisted world. Instead of simply moving straight ahead when feeling a force, they may be pushed sideways. In such a material current actually flows ...

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