Guestpost

By summerstudent Smat Inzhumarzhan > Summer internship, notes from the lab: This morning I found myself greeting the balance before anything else. It feels more important at times than checking email. Placing the vial, setting the scale to zero, tare, and counting down those few suspended seconds.In that quietness, I hear myself most clearly. I am spending the summer in Berlin, working on lead-free alternatives to perovskites. Perovskites are semiconductors molecules with remarkable optical and electronic properties, which make them highly attractive for solar cells and other applications. Working with them is not about dramatic reactions, but about tiny, consistent steps: dissolve, mix, and finallyRead More →

By summerstudent Axel Mena > The first time I heard the word proton therapy was on a Late-Night Show with Cecilia Bolocco, the only Chilean to win the Miss Universe pageant in Chile. She’s a celebrity in our country, although I genuinely couldn’t care less about the showbiz world, that time I was captivated. She was talking about the terrible cancer her son suffered from.  His cancer was so severe that no oncologist in our country offered a good prognosis. It seemed all was lost, until one day she heard about an innovative technique using protons to treat this type of cancer in the UnitedRead More →

By summerstudent Sumedha Ravishankar > You can liken PDFs to people. You have your inner circle of friends and then the ones you speak to sometimes and, eventually, those you will never meet. Maybe I should explain what I mean by PDF… and no, not the file format. PDF stands for pair distribution function. It’s a way to describe how atoms are arranged around one another. Imagine picking one atom and then measuring how many other atoms are a certain distance away – that’s what a PDF graph shows. The x-axis is the distance, and the y-axis is the number of atoms at that distance. ForRead More →

By summerstudent Calysta Angesti Pratana > I was hooked on renewables from the start, which is how I chose to study energy science and engineering. The idea of using the sun’s energy instead of just suffering its heat and using hydrogen for clean fuel seemed promising. The reality is that most hydrogen isn’t green. Most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels like natural gas or coal, a process that releases massive amounts of CO₂, making it “gray” and not green because the pollution is just moved from the tailpipe to the power plant smokestack. So, how do we fix this? The answer is: Photoelectrochemistry (PEC).Read More →

By summerstudent Maitryi Gupta > I still vividly remember the day when I received the mail regarding my selection in ISSP 2025. I was elated and overjoyed. Soon reality seeped in, and excitement turned into anxiety. I had heard that Germans are strict, punctual, extremely organised and very particular about everything. It was enough to make me question whether I’d fit in or be able to work properly in the lab. Fast forward to my first day at HZB, I met the other students, everyone was so warm and welcoming. We had great conversations, laughed a lot, and it immediately felt like a place whereRead More →

By summerstudent Carlos Garcia Villanueva > As someone who grew up in the outskirt in Barranquilla metropolitan area, also known as the birthplace of Shakira, I was exposed to living in an unequal society, even though I was a privileged kid. My interest for science was what drove me to choose chemistry as a career path, particulary influenced by a common situation, which was the accumulation of trash. Since I was kid I asked myself: Why trash does not seem to go away? Why the accumulation of waste in my neighborhood was more a feature of the landscape, than an anomaly? This was a questionRead More →

By summerstudent Damla Can Atıcı> When I was a kid, I once asked my dad:“How does a DVD have a whole movie inside, and how can we watch it on TV?”He looked at me and said,“This is beyond human technology. I’m pretty sure it was invented by aliens.” Years passed. The curiosity never left. And now… I’m working on understanding how memory technology might one day operate at ultrafast speeds. So yeah…I guess I’m the alien. How I met my supervisor During my previous internship at a research institute, we were collaborating with a team from Berlin. We had a beamtime scheduled — the long-awaitedRead More →

By summerstudent María José Oyola Torres > When I mention my research, people often ask about the process of making a solar cell. Before coming to HZB, I had experience fabricating solar cell devices in gloveboxes in both Colombia and Spain. I usually skip over the part where almost everything happens inside a nitrogen-filled glovebox.Not literally me inside the box, of course ­­­­­­­­­— Just my arms. But this time, I will explain: Most of the process takes place in the glovebox. This is a controlled environment, where oxygen and humidity are extremely low. That’s because we’re working with a highly sensitive semiconductor called perovskite. TheRead More →

By summerstudent Felipe Mata Mata > I study the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). If you’re wondering what that is and why anyone would bother with it, let me explain: The OER is a crucial step in water electrolysis – Yes, think back to your chemistry classes at school! Water is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, and splitting it has become a hopeful way to produce clean fuels. By using sunlight or wind to supply the necessary voltage, we can generate hydrogen without relying on fossil fuels, this is known as green hydrogen. That’s a big step toward sustainable energy using theRead More →