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Beate Heinemann, DESY Director in charge of Particle Physics, has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich (UZH). The Swiss university honoured her "for her outstanding scientific achievements in experimental elementary particle physics, for her pioneering role in the search for new particles and phenomena and for her associated contributions to the planning of future particle accelerators."

No physics analysis at the Large Hadron Collider LHC without DESY involvement: from autumn 2024, the role of physics coordinator of both large experiments at the LHC at CERN in Geneva will be held by DESY scientists.

An international team led by DESY scientist Felix Lehmkühler has utilized theworld’s largest X-ray laser European XFEL to scrutinise the properties of an important nanogel that is used in medicine to release drugs in a targeted and controlled manner at the desired location in a patient's body. The team now published the results in the journal Science Advances.

A group of 23 Israeli students visited DESY in Hamburg for a week. The group comes from the Israeli Schwartz/Reisman Science Education Center, an institution under the umbrella of the renowned Weizmann Institute of Science.

Robin Santra, Lead Scientist at DESY, professor of physics at Universität Hamburg and expert in ultrafast processes in intense radiation fields, has received one of the highest scientific honours in the US: he was elected an AAAS Fellow.

Astrophysicists from the University of Potsdam and DESY have made a significant step toward solving the last puzzle in magnetohydrodynamic turbulence theory by observing the weak to strong transition in the space plasma turbulence surrounding Earth with newly developed multi-spacecraft analysis methods. Their pioneering discovery was published today in the journal “Nature Astronomy”.

At the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference last week, the CMS collaboration presented a measurement of the effective leptonic electroweak mixing angle. The result is the most precise measurement of its kind performed at a hadron collider to date, and is in good agreement with the prediction from the Standard Model. Researchers from DESY played key roles in the preparation of this result. The...

More than 100 participants gathered on a hybrid meeting at DESY on 14-15 March to officially kick-off the new EU project RIANA. RIANA (standing for Research Infrastructure Access in Nanoscience & Nanotechnology) has officially been launched on 01 March to offer access to Europe’s leading facilities in nanoscience and nanotechnology that are at the heart of the development of new materials for prosperity and...

Researchers from the University of Zurich (UZH) have used convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to effectively filter noise from detector images and hence make scattering signals visible that would otherwise be virtually invisible. By using data from the PETRA III beamline P21.1, the group around Johan Chang, professor at the Physics institute at UZH, trained a deep CNN system such that a 20-fold reduction of...

DESY and IonQ, a leading firm in the quantum computing industry, present early results from their cooperation to run combinatorial optimization problems on IonQ’s quantum system. The results demonstrate quantum computing’s potential as a more effective solution than traditional classical computing when tackling equations with multiple variables in a dense environment – such as in a bustling airport. A publication explaining the project, which...

A collaborative effort between researchers from DESY, the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE), Chalmers University in Sweden and the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland has yielded a cutting-edge multimodal imaging approach to investigate breast cancer tissue. With the help of this technique, researchers can simultaneously extract information about the nanostructure of the tumor and quantify the chemical elements present in a millimeter-scale sample in...

The international ATLAS collaboration at CERN has recently elected Kerstin Tackmann, Lead Scientist at DESY and Professor at Universität Hamburg, as its next Physics Coordinator. Physics coordination is a key task in the collaboration and DESY is one of the few institutes to hold the post for the second time: DESY scientist Klaus Mönig was Physics Coordinator from October 2018 to September 2020.

The WIKOOP-INFRA project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), came to a successful conclusion on 29 February after running for two and a half years. The project, whose acronym stands for "Action and Orientation Security in Scientific Cooperations with China - Studies on Analytical Research Infrastructures", is one of the first projects to deal with the contemporary topic of...

Sodium-ion batteries still have a number of weaknesses that could be remedied by optimising the battery materials. One possibility is to dope the cathode material with foreign elements. To investigate the effects of doping with Scandium and Magnesium a team from Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin collected data at the X-ray synchrotron sources BESSY II, PETRA III, and SOLARIS. They uncovered two...

A life marked by scientific milestones, major decisions, ever larger accelerators and a great deal of scientific diplomacy: Herwig Schopper will be 100 years old on 28 February and will be honoured at a festive symposium at CERN on 1 March. DESY, which he headed as Chairman of the Directorate from 1972 to 1980, also has a lot to thank him for. Congratulations from...

Last week, the German Centre for Astrophysics (DZA) officially opened its interim location in the historic post office building on Postplatz in Görlitz. During the inauguration ceremony, Federal Research Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger and Saxony's Minister President Michael Kretschmer symbolically handed over the key to the DZA's designated founding director, Günther Hasinger, Professor at the Technical University of Dresden and Senior Scientist at DESY.

A group of researchers from DESY and the Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology KIPT(Ukraine) receives a grant from the German Research Foundation for studying the possibility to scrape off electrons from a booster synchrotron using a bent crystal. This might be of potential interest in view of future Test Beam Facilities.

Beata Ziaja-Motyka, group leader at the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) at DESY and professor at the Henryk Niewodniczański Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ-PAN) in Krakow, received the prestigious Award of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

An international team has performed an attosecond-scale experiment at an X-ray free-electron laser on liquid water for the first time, and the results may change our interpretation of water’s behaviour. The experiment team, led by scientist Linda Young from Argonne National Laboratory in the US, found an unusual signal when they examined liquid water using X-ray flashes that were timed a few hundred attoseconds...

Last week, the German Research Association and the Scientific Council gave the green light for two Hamburg-based proposals for the German Excellence Strategy to advance to the next stage of development. DESY will be crucial members of both initiatives: one regarding disease research at Universität Hamburg and one regarding water-driven materials at the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH).

On 1 February, the fellowship programme of the EU Project EURIZON for scientists in Ukraine launched. With these fellowships, EURIZON contributes to the support of scientific research in Ukraine under the conditions of the ongoing Russian invasion. The EU-financed project is a coalition of 26 European research institutes and is coordinated by DESY. The goal is the scientific and technical collaboration of European research...

Priscilla Pani, a scientist in the ATLAS group at DESY, has been awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant for a new method of searching for new particles. She will use the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva to pick up hints of new light particles that may interact with more massive versions of some of the constituent particles...

The upcoming Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO), of which DESY is a critical member, has begun production of its components. Calls for tender for the first components have already been sent out since December, a major milestone in the construction of the observatory’s first two telescopes, which will be located on La Palma in the Canary Islands and in the Atacama Desert in Chile....

What happens when radiation hits water? This is a question that has an impact every time you get an X-ray at the doctor’s office, given you are mostly made of water. A team of theoretical physicists at DESY has worked on data taken by colleagues from Argonne National Laboratory in the US at the LCLS X-ray laser in California to get a better answer...

Scientists at Universität Hamburg and DESY have developed a globally unique mobile computer tomograph as part of the Excellence Cluster “Understanding Written Artefacts” (UWA). The researchers call their device ENCI (“Extracting Non-destructively Cuneiform Inscriptions”), a reference to Enki, the Sumerian god of wisdom. With the help of this device, scientists could read for the first time 4000-year-old cuneiform tablets that are sealed from view....

The scientific collaboration running the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) telescope, using observations with the Cherenkov Telescope Array located in Namibia, has detected very high-energy gamma-rays above several tera-electronvolts coming from the SS 433 microquasar’s "western" and "eastern" jets in our Galaxy. This confirms the first ever detection of a microquasar in the tera-electronvolt range that the High Altitude Water Cherenkov Gamma-ray (HAWC) collaboration...

This year, DESY and European XFEL Users’ Meetings have bust out of its usual auditorium setting and instead made its way to the huge tents of the ‘Hamburg Kuppel’ across the street from DESY. With more than 1100 registered attendees, the Users’ Meetings are taking advantage of this special event venue. On the agenda, under the title of “Research with Synchrotron Radiation and FELs”,...

The DESYUM building now nearly has a complete skeleton: today, the building that will contain the DESY research centre’s visitor centre hosted its topping out ceremony. Since its foundation stone was set in place in May 2023, six storeys have risen above the entry rotunda near the research centre’s Notkestraße entrance in Hamburg. The DESYUM building’s 3250 square metres of usable space will host...

A research team from DESY and the University of Jena has for the first time demonstrated live the formation of the mineral stishovite (a form of silicon dioxide or silica, SiO2), which is often used as a mineral to detect ancient asteroid and meteorite impacts on the Earth's surface. The researchers observed the formation of the mineral using time-resolved X-ray diffraction experiments at DESY's...

A research team from Stockholm University, in collaboration with DESY and the Montanuniversität Leoben in Austria, has succeeded for the first time in investigating the surface of iron and ruthenium catalysts in the formation of ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen; the results have been published in the scientific journal Nature. With exact knowledge of how these catalysts work, it may be possible to identify...

DESY leading scientist Dr. Holger Sondermann has taken over as the new Scientific Director of the Centre for Structural Systems Biology (CSSB) for the coming two years. The CSSB, located on the DESY campus in Hamburg, is one of the campus’ core cooperative institutes involving DESY and eight other universities and research centres. On 1 December 2023, the CSSB Council confirmed the CSSB Directorate’s...

Anne L´Huillier from the University of Lund has visited the research centre DESY on Friday. The physicist, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics together with two colleagues for the experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter, visited DESY´s Hamburg site and the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science CFEL at the invitation of Francesca...

An international team of researchers led by Mungo Frost from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California and including DESY scientists used the European X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) in Schenefeld to gain new insights into the formation and occurrence of diamond rain in ice giants such as Neptune, Uranus, or exoplanets outside of our solar system. The results, which have now been published in...