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In: Corona, Energymaterials

Many colleagues work on site, others continue to work from home. These different working environments will continue to accompany us in the coming weeks. Therefore, we will introduce people telling us what it means to be back in the lab as well as people who continue working from home. Today we ask Rowshanak Irani, postdoctoral researcher at the HZB Solar Fuels Institute based in Wannsee. How did you start the lockdown period? I was lucky, as I had my PhD viva a few weeks before the lockdown. At HZB when you do your PhD in three years you get a contract extension for six months;Read More →

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In: Energymaterials, International, Summerstudents

OK, here we are. My name is Vlad. I’m a summer student from Moscow and the author of this note concurrently.  If you are reading this post, I bet 90% you was interested in the title. But I suggest to talk about it a bit later.  Just for the beginning , everything you need to know about solar cells is that they consist of silicon. The second point is that the first one was a lie. In fact, not only silicon is used in solar cells. Since the moment people decided to use solar cells as a real source of energy, scientists have been workingRead More →

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In: Energymaterials

My dear reader, I hope you are doing well and have a wonderful sunny day. I am standing on the quay of Lake Michigan in Chicago, acquiring a bit of sun this foggy day.    Today I have some free time for myself… I am thinking about responsibility for the planet, about humanity who made a big step from the uncontrollable usage of the non-renewable resources turning more and more towards the available wind, water and solar energy. The idea of using solar power is so obvious for me! The sun shines every day and it should not die out in the next billions ofRead More →

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In: BESSYBeamlineScientists, Careers, Lightsources

I work at the EMIL beamline which is a very complex system. It provides light for the EMIL laboratory (Energy Materials In-situ Laboratory Berlin) by combining two undulators: UE48 for the soft X-ray range and cryo-cooled U17 for the hard X-ray range. It delivers an energy range from 80 eV to 10000 eV to five end-stations. It has ten mirror chambers to guide the light and three monochromators to select the required energies, and it has a length of 62 m while only 1 m width.Read More →