Research Highlights

In this category especially chosen Research Highlights are presented in more detail, which have been published in a peer reviewed journal. Please recommend interesting papers, which are suitable for future highlights, to Wiebke Laasch.

13 March 2024

New imaging technique at PETRA III enables deeper insights in breast cancer metastasis

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 ...

28 February 2024

X-ray studies at PETRA III unveil the physics behind the encapsulation of the coronavirus

The COVID-19 pandemic has a severe ongoing impact on society. Therefore, the development of efficient treatment is crucial for the future while our understanding of the life cycle of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its interaction with its cell host is still comparatively limited. Already since the very beginning of the pandemic, an international team of scientists from DESY, Leipzig University (Germany), University of ...

23 February 2024

Unique combined setup at PETRA III for in-situ ultrasonic measurements at extreme conditions

Probing the Earth’s interior is a difficult task. Direct access to depths greater than 12 km in the crust – so far only reached by the Kola Superdeep borehole – is not nearly enough to reach the mantle below the continental crust. To understand plate tectonic processes, such as earthquakes, knowledge of rocks down to 700 km is required. Notwithstanding, experiments under extreme pressure and temperature ...

22 February 2024

Sodium-ion batteries: How doping works

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 ...

16 February 2024

First-ever X-ray attosecond experiment on liquids provides new insights into water’s molecular properties

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 ...

09 February 2024

Materials research for optical diagnostic windows in future fusion reactors

Magnesium aluminate spinel (MgAl2O4) has received significant practical interest because of the predicted tolerance to ionising irradiation. Therefore, this material is currently on the priority list of the EUROFUSION consortium for optical diagnostic windows in future deuterium-tritium fusion reactors. Investigations of radiative transitions in this material at the PETRA III beamline P66 and ...

31 January 2024

International team uncovers a groundbreaking model for the effects of radiation in water systems

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 at the LCLS X-ray laser (US) to get a better answer to this question. What they found may settle a controversy in physics about the ...

19 January 2024

PETRA III solves decades-old mystery of asteroid impacts

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 ...

18 January 2024

Research team investigates the reaction mechanism for catalytic ammonia production at PETRA III

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 even ...

11 January 2024

Combined IR spectroscopy and surface X-Ray diffraction setup for chemical and structural in-situ characterisation

Electrocatalysis is the decisive factor for a future energy system based on renewable resources. Typically, the most active electrocatalysts retain a high level of complexity in terms of structure and chemical composition. New analytical approaches are required to advance the characterisation of electrocatalysts under operating conditions. In particular, to correlate the structure with the reactivity of the active ...

10 January 2024

New findings on diamond rain on ice planets

An international team of researchers, including from DESY and led by Mungo Frost from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (U.S.), used the European X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) 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 the scientific journal Nature ...

08 January 2024

Medically relevant nanoparticles move faster in cells than expected

A team of scientists from DESY and Universität Hamburg has discovered in an experiment that gold nanoparticles can move through liquid biological matter faster than expected when coated by the polymer polyethylene glycol (PEG). The data, which were acquired using X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy, reveal both the structure and the dynamics of the nanoparticles in various biological fluids with high temporal ...