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In: Energymaterials, Summerstudents

For already one month I am a part of the Internship Program in the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin. Upon arriving to The Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin on the first day of my internship I was filled with mixed emotions, most notable of anxiety and excitement. I recall feeling both surprised and honored to have been presented with my own office. Once I had settled into what would be my workspace for the next two months, I was reminded of the feeling I had when studying into my freshman year of my university. It was an intense feeling of both responsibility and accomplishment. Working at The Helmholtz ZentrumRead More →

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In: Energymaterials, Summerstudents

Have you ever been sitting in company, discussing ridiculous stories about your scars and injuries? Probably, yes. Once, I spent a whole evening talking about these funny cases with my friends. However, the story of the scar I got because of a hot radiator, was outshined by a guy who has gotten a serious burn while he was sleeping with a laptop on his knees. That day I didn’t believe his story, but later I noticed that occasionally my electronic devices heated up incredibly. “Nothing is perfect”, I thought and forgot about this episode for a while. A couple years later, I arrived in aRead More →

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In: Energymaterials, Students, Summerstudents

A friend of mine that is not connected with physics at all once wondered what I were doing at neutron reactor. That is why she asked me a simple question: “How will your work save the world?” When you are deep inside of your work, physicists, chemists, biologists sometimes forget about that big beautiful aim of everything what we are doing here. Science is not only for your own development, your own interest: it is the way to make the world around better, it is an instrument for doing something great. So, how am I going to save the world? You won’t believe, with water.Read More →

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In: Energymaterials, Summerstudents

The story began from southern Jordan, specifically from my home city “ Al-Karak ”, where I am actually living and studying. It takes about one hour and 30 minutes to reach the Queen Alia International Airport (QAIA) by car. The challenges began as I reached the check point inside the airport, maybe because it was my first flight alone outside Jordan. Also, the fact that not all the people in Germany speaks English made me a bit afraid. after four hours and twenty minutes, one of my childhood dreams came true, I am in Germany guys! Mercedes, Audi, Volkswagen, and Opel home country! as I gotRead More →

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In: Energymaterials, Students, Summerstudents

  Why so charming the science is? I think this question always lingers in our mind. When I was a child, I remember the best day maybe the day I got a box of crayons from my parents, I used them to draw a bird, a cloud, and my happy family. Over time, I became a master student at Peking University (China), and my major research field is organic materials synthesis and application. Luckily, this summer I became a summer student of HZB, have to say, I really enjoy the life here, so I decided to make an electrochromic graffito as a gift for HZB. As you can see in theRead More →

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In: Energymaterials, Summerstudents

Non-renewable energy has shaped the world along the past century, and distributed the powers and political blocs, and as a result contributed to the distribution of prosperity, perhaps freedom in regions, and misery in other regions. Will renewable energy reshape the world again? Non-renewable energy is easy to store. In general, it is stored as chemical energy in oil liquids, natural gas, or even coal, but this ease of storage may not be in renewable energy so there may be another issue that will contribute to creating competition among the peoples of the earth and their governments, and here I hope that the competition willRead More →

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In: Energymaterials, Students, Summerstudents

My summer research project is Optimizing Buried Junction Cubic and Orthorhombic SnS Photocathodes.  For many years my research group have been searching for semiconductors and solar absorber materials that are non-toxic, abundant, stable, which crystallize at low temperature and are fabricated at low cost, but also have favorable optical and electrical properties for solar energy conversion. Figure 1: π-SnS photocathodes a) before and b) after coating with a passivation and protection layer. When designing a system for solar water splitting it has been proposed that an idealized tandem device, consisting of two semiconductors with band gaps around 1.0 to 1.3 eV and 1.6 to 2.0Read More →

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In: Energymaterials, Students, Summerstudents

Have you noticed that strange whistling sound on Hahn-Meitner Campus at Wannsee? When I told the PhD students of the research group for inorganic and solid state chemistry at the Technische Universität Berlin that I will be part of the Summer Students Programme at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, one of them had something interesting to tell me. He advised me to pay attention to a whistling sound on Campus Wannsee and he also revealed to me where to find the source of the sound. So on my fourth day at Wannsee I decided to find that thing that made me listen attentively to its music. AtRead More →

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In: Energymaterials, Students, Summerstudents

Exploring the hidden secrets of materials using spectroscopy Over 60% of Germans rely on glasses and unsurprisingly, this is not a modern phenomenon. The first eyeglasses were made in Italy in the 13th century and their importance has grown since. But sometimes, good vision is not sufficient in order to explore the hidden secrets of materials. In the last century, physicists have developed a method called spectroscopy, which is a technique used to analyse light by breaking it up into its component colours and it’s something that I am doing very regularly during the summer student programme at the HZB. Designing the next generation ofRead More →

THE ROAD TO ARTIFICIAL PHOTOSYNTHESIS

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In: Energymaterials, International, Students, Summerstudents

As a summer student at the HZB, I am working at the Institute for Solar Fuels on Artificial Photosynthesis research. In the project, I am taking part in, we aim  to improve and characterize two materials, namely BaxMnyOz and MnxVyOz. By using Pulse Laser Deposition (PLD) as the synthesis method, our goal is to investigate the structure and photoelectrochemical properties of these materials by various methods and optimize them towards improving their solar-water-splitting efficiency. This project and research at the Institute for Solar Fuels is based on the search for new light absorbing materials, which can harness the sun’s radiation to produce clean energy from the most abundant resource on earth, water (H2O). This hasRead More →