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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: Lightsources, Students, Summerstudents

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 →

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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: Students, Summerstudents

Just a Student I am a physics student who has delved into my first theoretical physics internship. From this transition of student to scientist, I’ve gained some insights that have shifted my view on academia and the world of scientific research. Recently, I’ve learned a lot about what truly makes a scientist, or rather, the difference in attitude from that of a student. As an undergraduate student at University of Toronto, the topics I’ve learned have only been applied in the form of tests and exams. Ultimately, it’s when you leave the lecture halls and enter real research where you can begin to shift yourRead More →

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In: International, Summerstudents

With that statement, I used to begin my day in the blue building of PVcomb… I had the chance to participate with the PV to Fuels Technology group in a project for developing a novel type of hydrogen electrolyzers. These electrolyzers are devices that can use the produced voltage from solar cells to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. Therefore, they can enable us to store the solar energy as a chemical fuel, H2; so that we can use it later whenever there is a demand for electricity regardless of the solar irradiance profile over the day. My work is all about simulating newRead 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: International, Summerstudents

Date: Not important From: Not important                                              Departure at: Not important Destination: Not important                                  Arrival at: Not important Duration: 13h 45min The flight started with much hope, some thoughts and many dreams for what is coming after it lands. It turned out that I should had thought a little about the flight itself in advance. It took only a couple of minutes to figure out that the IndianRead 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 →