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With the declared aim of measuring matter under extreme pressure, an international research collaboration including DESY researchers and headed by the University of Rostock and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) used the high-performance laser DIPOLE 100-X at the European XFEL for the first time in 2023. With spectacular results: In this initial experiment they managed to study liquid carbon – an unprecedented achievement as the...

Usually, hydrogen is a colourless gas. Under ultra-high pressure, however, this simplest of all elements should turn into an electrically conducting solid. For decades, this metallic hydrogen has been one of the most important goals in high-pressure research, but conclusive proof of its existence has been elusive. With the assistance of experts at DESY’s X-ray source PETRA III in Hamburg, Chinese researchers have now...

An interdisciplinary research team from the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) at DESY, the Centre for Structural Systems Biology (CSSB), the Center for Ultrafast Imaging (CUI) at the University of Hamburg, and Uppsala University has published a review in the renowned journal Nature Methods that sheds light on the future potential of combining two key technologies in structural biology: X-ray imaging and cryo-electron...

With an international conference on “Higher Structures, Moduli Spaces and Integrability”, the Collaborative Research Centre (Sonderforschungsbereich, SFB) of the same name organised by DESY and the University of Hamburg was officially opened at the beginning of April. On this occasion, leading scientists from the field of mathematical physics from all over the world came to Hamburg to discuss the latest developments in algebra and...

The project “Beamline for Schools” has been turning high school students into temporary scientists for more than ten years. It’s a project of records and firsts: more than 20 000 students between the ages of 16 and 19 from all over the world have come in touch with it over the course of its existence. So far, 25 teams of students have actually performed...

Laser-plasma accelerators can accelerate particles over distances that are up to 1000 times shorter than those required by conventional accelerators. The technology promises compact systems that have enormous potential to open up new applications for accelerators, for example in medicine or industry. However, the current prototypes have one drawback: most can only accelerate a few particle bunches per second – not enough for practical...

They can be a nightmare for farmers and gardeners: galls, abnormal plant growths caused by various organisms, can damage crops and other plants. Researchers have used PETRA III to analyse galls caused by mites that infest the leaves of various trees and bushes. What they found is incredible: the mites alter the plants’ metabolism of trace metals in the newly formed galls to better...

DESY scientists are among the recipients of the prestigious Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The Breakthrough Prizes, sometimes referred to as “Oscars of Science”, are awarded by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation to a range of different scientific disciplines. This year’s Prize for Fundamental Physics, worth three million US dollars, recognises the 13 000+ scientists from around the world working on the four experiments ALICE,...

Single-particle diffractive imaging (SPI) using X-ray free-electron lasers allows researchers to reconstruct the structure of nanoparticles and biomolecules. However, the technique often requires imaging up to several billion nanoparticles to produce the image and imposes limitations on its clarity and sharpness. Researchers at the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science at DESY, together with international colleagues, recently demonstrated that laser-induced alignment can indeed be achieved...

Laser plasma acceleration is a potentially disruptive technology: It could be used to build far more compact accelerators and open up new use cases in fundamental research, industry and health. However, on the path to real-world applications, some properties of the plasma-driven electron beam as delivered by current prototype accelerators still need to be refined. DESY’s LUX experiment has now made significant progress in...

Professor Beate Heinemann is to become the new head of the research centre DESY. On 1 April 2025, she will take over as the Chairperson of DESY’s Board of Directors, to which she already belongs in her capacity as Director for Particle Physics. Beate Heinemann will be taking over from Helmut Dosch, who has presided over the centre for more than 16 years. This...

With 32 academic and industrial partners, the program led by DESY receives 4 million euros of funding from Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions to support 15 PhD projects and act as an accelerator for the European innovation ecosystem. The application portal will open on April 1st.

New high-resolution X-ray and electron microscopy methods enable the optimization of energy materials at the atomic level. Researchers at DESY are studying catalysts for more efficient water electrolysis and ultra-fast switching processes for more powerful processors – a key to the energy transition and future technologies.

A team of DESY researchers, led by DESY lead scientist and University of Kiel professor Melanie Schnell, has managed to control the generation of left- and right-handed organic molecules at the single quantum level using a sequence of microwave pulses, a long-standing challenge in chemistry. The phenomenon of handedness, or chirality, is critical for understanding the chemical foundations of life, as well as for...

By laying the foundation stone of the DESY Innovation Factory in the Altona Innovation Park today, DESY is setting an important milestone on the way to Science City Hamburg Bahrenfeld. Hamburg's Second Mayor and Senator for Science Katharina Fegebank, Melanie Leonhard, Senator for Economics and Innovation, and other guests of honor attended the event.

A previously unseen quantum phenomenon first predicted several years ago has been experimentally demonstrated by an international research team, including DESY scientists, at PETRA III. The team observed a tornado-like quantum structure in a semimetal compound, tantalum arsenide (TaAs), wherein electrons behave like a swirling vortex in momentum space. The discovery, a collaborative effort between the Würzburg–Dresden Cluster of Excellence for Complexity and Topology...

More than 800 million people live near an active volcano. Some of these volcanoes still defy existing models, making the exact prediction of their eruptions impossible. This is the case for Colli Albani in Italy, which has produced major explosions in the past despite its magma being normally associated with mild effusive eruptions. An international team led by the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and...

The Beate Naroska Awards for the year 2024 will be awarded to Ursula Bassler (Laboratoire Leprince-Ringuet at École Polytechnique) and to Azadeh Maleknejad (Department of Physics, King’s College London).

With the help of the world's most powerful X-ray laser, European XFEL, a research team led by Goethe University Frankfurt and the research centre DESY has achieved an important breakthrough: Using the example of the pharmaceutically active substance 2-thiouracil, they applied a long-established imaging technique to complex molecules for the first time. Although 2-thiouracil is no longer applied therapeutically, it is part of a...

The kick-off event for AstroCentPlus (AC+) - an important project for the further development of astroparticle physics in Poland - took place in Warsaw in mid-February. AC+ is funded by the EU ‘United in Excellence’ programme and aims to expand the AstroCent Institute at the Nicolaus Copernicus Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences as an international centre for cutting-edge research and innovation. DESY...

It’s official: with an inaugural ceremony on 26 February on the DESY Campus in Hamburg, the DESY-initiated Centre for Molecular Water Science (CMWS) Consortium has formed. The CMWS is a Europe-wide research network in the field of molecular water research, crossing subjects, disciplines, and methods. Forty-seven founding members from twelve countries – including fourteen German universities and eight Helmholtz Centres – have signed the...

Soil bacteria studies of climate impacts, optimized plant behaviour, artificial intelligence in super markets, a robot dog prototype: all things that you could find at DESY at the regional Hamburg-Bahrenfeld competition of Jugend Forscht (lit. “Young people do research”). The Germany-wide science fair allows children the chance to perform actual research and compete on the strength of their results. In this regional competition, held...

A delegation consisting of representatives from the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and from DESY signed a strategic collaboration agreement in Munich today. Their groundbreaking collaboration aims to pool expertise, infrastructure and knowledge across individual research institutions to open up new paths for the commercialization of technology in industry and society.

How can scientific findings be converted into innovations for society as quickly as possible together with industrial users? This question was the focus of discussions between DESY representatives and industrial partners together with Melanie Leonhard