2022

Chemical processes are all around us. From novel materials to more effective medicines or plastic products – chemical reactions play a key role in the design of the things we use every day. ... Chemical reactions occur on the scale of atomic vibrations - one million times smaller than the thickness of a human hair. These tiny movements are difficult to control. Established methods include ...

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When a material with magnetic properties, constructed from appropriately selected layers, is illuminated by a pulse from an X-ray laser, it instantly demagnetizes. This phenomenon, so far poorly ... No information-processing device can operate at a speed faster than that at which the physical phenomena underlying its operation occur. That is why physicists continue to seek phenomena that run on ...

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Whenever the conversations at DESY turned to coronavirus research, his name was usually mentioned in the same breath: Alke Meents. During the early stages of the pandemic, the CFEL physicist had ... According to Jörg Rossbach, chair of the Bjørn H. Wiik Prize Committee, “Alke Meents has a much broader background than just Covid research. He has taken a leading role in continuing to ...

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The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded Andrea Trabattoni, a scientist at CFEL and DESY, a Starting Grant of 1.5 million euro. The ERC Starting Grants are meant as funding for early-career ... Trabattoni’s winning proposal focuses on the seminal concepts used in the excitation of matter using lasers. SoftMeter would use two weak electromagnetic fields – generated by combining ...

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DESY researcher Franz Kärtner has been awarded the Laser Instrumentation Award by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The director and group leader at CFEL at DESY is being ... Kärtner and his team have developed laser technology that uses ultrashort laser flashes to synchronize large systems, such as X-ray lasers, to within femtoseconds, even over kilometers. This is ...

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An international team of researchers has gained important insights into the electronic structure of hydrated proton complexes in solution: The involvement of a certain number of water molecules in ...

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An international research team led by the MPSD’s Microstructured Quantum Matter Department at CFEL reports the first observation of switchable chiral transport in a structurally achiral crysal, the ... Whether or not an object is indistinguishable from its mirror image has important consequences for its physical behavior. Say you watch a basketball player in a mirror. The ball, the player and their ...

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Francesca Calegari, lead scientist at CFEL, DESY and Professor at the University of Hamburg, now received the prestigious ICO Prize 2017 of the International Commission for Optics (ICO). Due to the ...

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MPSD scientists at CFEL discover anomalous emission of terahertz radiation from copper oxides in which superconductivity coexists with charge-stripe order.   Why do some materials carry ... Now a team of researchers from Andrea Cavalleri’s group at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) at CFEL has provided evidence that electron ...

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DESY not only operates various accelerator facilities, it is also working on promising concepts for the future: “Laser plasma acceleration should one day make it possible to build machines that ... Particle accelerators belong to the most important tools in science. Among other things, they generate extremely intense X-rays that can be used to examine and analyze a wide variety of samples and ...

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Three natural compounds present in foods like green tea, olive oil and red wine are promising candidates for the development of drugs against the coronavirus. In a comprehensive screening of a large ... “We tested 500 substances from the Karachi Library of Natural Compounds if they bind to the papain-like protease of the novel coronavirus, which is one of the main targets for an antiviral ...

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Kateryna Kusyak, a PhD student in James McIver’s research group at the MPSD at CFEL, has been honored with the Jean-Marie Lehn and Klaus von Klitzing Prize for the best Master’s thesis in ... In her thesis, Kateryna demonstrated how to increase the bandwidth of on-chip terahertz spectroscopy by 40%. This spectroscopy technique is used to investigate what color of light is absorbed by ...

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The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded an ERC Starting Grant to Enrico Ronca, a former member and visiting scientist of the MPSD's Theory Department at CFEL and a researcher at the ... The highly competitive ERC Starting Grants are targeted at outstanding early-career scientists to allow them to perform groundbreaking research. Ronca’s project is about the development of ...

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Felix Sturm, a Master student in the MPSD research group Ultrafast Transport in Quantum Materials at CFEL, has been honored for obtaining the best Bachelor degree in Nanosciences at the University of ... Felix wrote his Bachelor thesis at the MPSD. He investigated the electronic transport of MoTe₂ (Molybdenum ditelluride), a Weyl semimetal, and focused on the nonlinear Hall effect. In this ...

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Hope Bretscher from the Ultrafast Transport in Quantum Materials research group at CFEL has been selected for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellowship to investigate the behavior of electrons in ... The ultrathin materials of interest are crystalline solids, meaning that they are made up of atoms which are bonded together in very ordered, repeating patterns. When two layers of the same material ...

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Theoreticians at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) at CFEL have demonstrated how the coupling between intense lasers, the motion of electrons, and their spin ... Electrons, present in all kind of matter, are charged particles and therefore they react to the application of light. When an intense light field hits a solid, these particles experience a force, ...

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Laser light can radically change the properties of solid materials, making them superconducting or magnetic within millionths of a billionth of a second. The intense light causes fundamental, ... The team studied a monolayer of hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) just one atom thick, whose lattice can be excited to vibrate on timescales of tens of femtoseconds. A first ‘pump’ laser ...

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DESY scientist Henry Chapman at CFEL has received the 2021 Gregori Aminoff Prize for Crystallography from the hands of Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf on Monday. Aminoff Prize winners from three ... Chapman, who is also a professor at the University of Hamburg and a member of the Hamburg Cluster of Excellence CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter, was awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of ...

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Jérôme Faist, Professor at the Institute for Quantum Electronics at ETH Zürich, is to receive a Humboldt Research Award to pursue his work at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure ... His research centers on the fluctuating fields found in a vacuum and how these could be controlled. Quantum mechanics predicts that even in the absence of any irradiation with light, vacuum is ...

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Laser plasma acceleration is a disruptive technology for a new generation of particle accelerators that will not only be very compact, and therefore economical to build, but also highly versatile. ... “Andreas is one of the world leading experts in the community of laser plasma accelerators. With his deep know-how in laser technology and his sharp focus on applications, I fully expect that ...

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Patrik Vagovic, a scientist from the SPB/SFX instrument at European XFEL and CFEL/DESY has received one of the first European Innovation Council (EIC) Pathfinder grants. The European Commission funds ... The Megahertz-Tomoscopy project centers around imaging of matter under fast motions with velocities from several meters to several kilometers per second. Patrik Vagovic is  constructing a ...

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Tais Gorkhover has been Professor of "Experimental Physics with a focus on X-ray Physics at Free-Electron Lasers" at the Department of Physics at Universität Hamburg located at CFEL since ... For the development of more environmentally friendly chemicals or novel materials, it is important to be able to take high-resolution images of processes in molecules and nanoparticles. Tais ...

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Laser pulses that briefly grab hold of floating molecules and align them precisely in space – this may sound like an original but academic party trick, however the technique which the team led ... For some time now, it has been possible, in principle, to take hold of complex molecules and align them using short laser pulses. However, to do this the laser usually has to be active all the time, ...

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Exploding a photo subject in order to take its picture? An international research at the European XFEL used this "extreme" method to take pictures of complex molecules. The scientists team ... The images are an important step towards recording molecular movies, which researchers hope to use in the future to observe details of biochemical and chemical reactions or physical changes at high ...

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When mid-infrared laser pulses hit certain complex materials, their fundamental properties can change in astonishing ways. They may become magnetic, ferroelectric or begin to carry electrical ... So far, nonlinear phononics has been thought to occur only within the small region of the crystal where the mid-infrared light pulse is present. Now researchers in Hamburg have discovered that the ...

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There are very few people in the world who take a stab at watching and manipulating nuclear transitions by exploiting the surrounding electrons and tailored lasers. DESY’s Helmholtz young ... "I am very pleased that Andrea Trabattoni's joint junior professorship will bring us closer together with Leibniz Universität Hannover in a first joint appointment," says Edgar ...

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