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“Be a diamond. Flourish under pressure” – Maureen Joyce Connolly To most people diamonds are well-known as the marvelous gemstones which used in a piece of jewelry. However, they are not only “a girl’s best friends”. Due to their remarkable physical and optical properties diamonds can be used by scientists and engineers as well! With this blogpost I’ll guide you through my research here at HZB and, hopefully, will share the delight and enjoyment of working with diamonds. Why diamonds? To have a better understanding of diamond it is useful to have a look at its crystalline structure. The strong sp3 covalent bonds between carbonRead More →

Jian Ren and Prof. Brian Paul Schmidt in #LINO19

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Science Without Borders: Impressions from the 69th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting (2019) Guestpost by Jian Ren As a doctoral researcher in Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, I have been offered many opportunities to expand my horizons by working in an optimal international research environment and by participating in international conferences. Recently, I received another gift from HZB – I was nominated and financially supported by HZB to take part in the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings. 580 young scientists meet Nobel Laureates The Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings have become an event of great importance for the exchange between generations of scientists each summer since 1951. In this year, theRead More →

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By Elżbieta Wątor How to get back to BESSY II ? From Kraków where I study, it’s really easy. By car – it’s around 6 hours and the route is quite convienient. There is also a Ryanair flight to Berlin Schönefeld every morning or Flixbus several times per day. But how to organise that? Here’s my brief story: My participation in the 2017 Summer Student Programme was a happy coincidence. In November 2016 I took part in a small student seminar at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, where Rafał Piwowarczyk (a summer student in MX group at BESSY II in 2016) talked about his stayRead More →

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At HZB about 150 young scientists are working on their doctoral dissertation. 81 come from abroad to Berlin to do their PhD in the HZB labs in Wannsee or Adlershof. The PhD students at HZB have organized themselves: twice a month, they invite to an informal get-together, they plan workshops and an annual PhD retreat in a country hotel in Brandenburg. This is actively supported by the management. I recently asked Daniel Meza, one of eight current doctoral student representatives about their activities. Daniel, why do you work as a representative in the PhD students organization ? Daniel: Maybe it’s a bit romantic, but forRead More →

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Quantum Mechanics Can Be Useful Too! Nowadays, it seems that quantum mechanics is seen more as “spooky” than practical. Thus, I am here to “de-mystify” some of the science behind a fascinating process that’s yet to be simulated properly. My research group investigates the theory behind what is called Interatomic Coulomb Electron Capture (ICEC). This fascinating universal quantum process is yet to be fully understood, and we are here to change that. Someday, this could be an incredibly useful tool to revolutionize atomic and quantum chemical energy transfers. ICEC In A Nutshell The general process includes 3 main steps that occur simultaneously. We’ve got two atoms, atom A andRead More →

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In chemistry, working up a synthesis route or a method which leads to the favored product is a challenging, lengthy procedure. Most of the time it is based on the concept “trial and error” and a lot is discovered by coincidence. For instance, the today’s industrial processes hydroformylation and the Czochralski process have their roots in accidental discoveries and very precise observation. Before a synthesis method becomes a large industrial process the synthesis must be optimized in a much smaller scale. That happens in the laboratory and is an odyssey that includes varying different parameters. Chemists refer to their work in the laboratory as “cooking”.Read More →

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If you try to search for “PSO” abbreviation in wiki you may find Pacific Symphony Orchestra or Phase-shift oscillator. However, my project at HZB is about neither music nor electricity, but mathematics. For almost a month here I have been working on an algorithm called Particle Swarm Optimization method and I would like you to have some impression of it.  Optimization Actually, the definition of optimization problem is quite simple. One has a function of n-variables f(x1, …, xn) and seeks to find such values of variables that give minimum to the function. However, the solution is not that simple, because in general you cannotRead More →

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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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  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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Time is an intriguing concept, isn’t it? We could summarize our own existence in terms of seconds, but there is so much more happening in shorter periods of time, and that’s the main objective of my project. We care about “picoseconds”, an incredibly small subdivision of the second. To help putting things into perspective, there are as many picoseconds in a second as seconds are in THIRTY ONE THOUSAND AND SEVEN HUNDRED years. Yeah, that´s right. But what the hell happens during that time? Well, electrons happen. The guys responsible for driving our whole world as we know it today happen to have an incredibly rich andRead More →