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Professor Beate Heinemann is to become the new head of the research centre DESY. On 1 April 2025, she will take over as the Chairperson of DESY’s Board of Directors, to which she already belongs in her capacity as Director for Particle Physics. Beate Heinemann will be taking over from Helmut Dosch, who has presided over the centre for more than 16 years. This...

With 32 academic and industrial partners, the program led by DESY receives 4 million euros of funding from Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions to support 15 PhD projects and act as an accelerator for the European innovation ecosystem. The application portal will open on April 1st.

New high-resolution X-ray and electron microscopy methods enable the optimization of energy materials at the atomic level. Researchers at DESY are studying catalysts for more efficient water electrolysis and ultra-fast switching processes for more powerful processors – a key to the energy transition and future technologies.

A team of DESY researchers, led by DESY lead scientist and University of Kiel professor Melanie Schnell, has managed to control the generation of left- and right-handed organic molecules at the single quantum level using a sequence of microwave pulses, a long-standing challenge in chemistry. The phenomenon of handedness, or chirality, is critical for understanding the chemical foundations of life, as well as for...

By laying the foundation stone of the DESY Innovation Factory in the Altona Innovation Park today, DESY is setting an important milestone on the way to Science City Hamburg Bahrenfeld. Hamburg's Second Mayor and Senator for Science Katharina Fegebank, Melanie Leonhard, Senator for Economics and Innovation, and other guests of honor attended the event.

A previously unseen quantum phenomenon first predicted several years ago has been experimentally demonstrated by an international research team, including DESY scientists, at PETRA III. The team observed a tornado-like quantum structure in a semimetal compound, tantalum arsenide (TaAs), wherein electrons behave like a swirling vortex in momentum space. The discovery, a collaborative effort between the Würzburg–Dresden Cluster of Excellence for Complexity and Topology...

More than 800 million people live near an active volcano. Some of these volcanoes still defy existing models, making the exact prediction of their eruptions impossible. This is the case for Colli Albani in Italy, which has produced major explosions in the past despite its magma being normally associated with mild effusive eruptions. An international team led by the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and...

The Beate Naroska Awards for the year 2024 will be awarded to Ursula Bassler (Laboratoire Leprince-Ringuet at École Polytechnique) and to Azadeh Maleknejad (Department of Physics, King’s College London).

With the help of the world's most powerful X-ray laser, European XFEL, a research team led by Goethe University Frankfurt and the research centre DESY has achieved an important breakthrough: Using the example of the pharmaceutically active substance 2-thiouracil, they applied a long-established imaging technique to complex molecules for the first time. Although 2-thiouracil is no longer applied therapeutically, it is part of a...

The kick-off event for AstroCentPlus (AC+) - an important project for the further development of astroparticle physics in Poland - took place in Warsaw in mid-February. AC+ is funded by the EU ‘United in Excellence’ programme and aims to expand the AstroCent Institute at the Nicolaus Copernicus Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences as an international centre for cutting-edge research and innovation. DESY...

It’s official: with an inaugural ceremony on 26 February on the DESY Campus in Hamburg, the DESY-initiated Centre for Molecular Water Science (CMWS) Consortium has formed. The CMWS is a Europe-wide research network in the field of molecular water research, crossing subjects, disciplines, and methods. Forty-seven founding members from twelve countries – including fourteen German universities and eight Helmholtz Centres – have signed the...

Soil bacteria studies of climate impacts, optimized plant behaviour, artificial intelligence in super markets, a robot dog prototype: all things that you could find at DESY at the regional Hamburg-Bahrenfeld competition of Jugend Forscht (lit. “Young people do research”). The Germany-wide science fair allows children the chance to perform actual research and compete on the strength of their results. In this regional competition, held...

A delegation consisting of representatives from the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and from DESY signed a strategic collaboration agreement in Munich today. Their groundbreaking collaboration aims to pool expertise, infrastructure and knowledge across individual research institutions to open up new paths for the commercialization of technology in industry and society.

How can scientific findings be converted into innovations for society as quickly as possible together with industrial users? This question was the focus of discussions between DESY representatives and industrial partners together with Melanie Leonhard

Last week the first CTAO ERIC Council Meeting was held in Bologna, Italy, and marked the beginning of a new management era. The CTAO ERIC Council was formally established during this inaugural meeting, solidifying the governance framework of the CTAO. Following the European Commission’s creation of the CTAO ERIC in January 2025, the newly formed Council plays a fundamental role in steering the organisation’s...

A team led by DESY scientist Tim Laarmann has successfully detected the vibrational fingerprints of glucose molecules in aqueous solution using a nonlinear optical method in the mid-infrared spectral range called ultra-broadband vibrational sum-frequency generation (VSFG) spectroscopy. The centerpiece of this study is a state-of-the-art VSFG spectrometer that operates effectively at physiologically relevant low sample concentrations in the range of 10 mM, or about...

Light-sensitive nanoparticles promise a wide range of applications, for example in the field of sensor technology or energy generation. However, these require knowledge and control of the processes taking place within them. Plasmons, collective electron movements in the nanoparticle which transport energy, are essential in the behaviour of such nanoparticles. Time-resolved experiments in the attosecond range reveal now that the importance of electronic correlations...

How are innovation and transfer activities implemented at a research center like DESY? This question was the focus of a visit on 5 February by Michael Kellner, Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection (BMWK), to the DESY campus in Zeuthen. During talks and a tour, he learned how DESY develops new technologies and promotes the transfer of...

An international team of scientists from DESY, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the University of Edinburgh, and Karlsruhe Institute for Technology has developed a novel approach to accurately determine the melting temperature of opaque materials using X-ray phase contrast imaging and X-ray diffraction in the laser heated diamond anvil cell at up to pressures of 500 000 bar and 4000 Kelvin. The team lead by...

Do you sometimes find yourself thinking, ‘I wonder what ChatGPT has to say about this’? It has become common practice to consult artificial intelligence (AI) on a wide range of topics and problems. Scientists at DESY and the University of Hamburg have now asked this question with regard to operating an accelerator and have discovered that ChatGPT can help them to run these machines....

Over the past years, scientists worldwide have collaborated extensively to develop cutting-edge approaches with helical free-electron laser (FEL) pulses. These advancements aim to capture some of the fastest motions in nature, exploring them at the level of specific elements with a special ‘twist’. In Physical Review Research, leading experts from institutions such as the University of Hamburg, DESY, European XFEL, and SLAC outline the...

Andrea Trabattoni, a scientist at CFEL, DESY, and W2 professor for Ultrafast Photoelectron Research at Leibniz University Hannover (LUH), has been awarded a Niedersachsen-Impuls-Professorship. This prestigious funding is aimed at advancing his career by expanding his expertise, refining his professional profile, and preparing him for future leadership roles in science. Additionally, the grant is set to strengthen the already close collaboration between DESY and...

High level of participation once again at the users' meetings 2025 of the Hamburg X-ray light sources. More than 1100 scientists have registered to discuss latest research performed at the DESY's X-ray light source PETRA III and free-electron laser FLASH as well as at the X-ray laser European XFEL and to inform themselves about new developments and future prospects over the course of the...

Jacco Vink, a leading expert in the field of high-energy astrophysics, has been awarded the prestigious Humboldt Research Award. This accolade recognizes internationally renowned scientists whose work has made a lasting impact on their field. The award includes a research stay at DESY, fostering further scientific collaboration.