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.

06 February 2025

PETRA III delivers novel approach to determine melting at high pressures

An international team of scientists from DESY Photon Science, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (U.S.), the University of Edinburgh (UK), and Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (Germany) 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 ...

04 February 2025

Femtosecond insights into laser-assisted photoemission from metal surfaces

The recent advancements in high-intensity ultrafast X-ray science have paved the way for a new era of time-resolved pump-probe experiments: They have the potential to reveal previously inaccessible information about the interactions of photons with surfaces and the electronic dynamics they induce. This study presents an innovative investigation of the laser-assisted photoelectric effect (LAPE) from metallic ...

17 January 2025

Developing irradiation-insensitive glasses through yielding

How do photons interact with amorphous materials? A collaboration between scientists from the group of ‘Disordered Systems’ at the University of Padua and DESY Photon Science has unveiled how glasses prepared using different methods respond to irradiation with hard X-rays. The simultaneous study of the structural, dynamic and thermodynamic modifications induced by photons suggests that X-rays can generate an ...

16 January 2025

Discovery of a new class of bacterial enzymes

Researchers at DESY Photon Science, together with international colleagues, have discovered a new class of enzymes that can be used to uncover previously unknown biological processes. The researchers suspect that these bacterial “diDNases” - the technical term - could play an important role in the immune defense of bacteria. The team recently published their findings in the renowned journal “Nucleic Acids ...

08 January 2025

A high-performance optical amplifier for microdevices

Researchers at DESY Photon Science have developed a millimeter-sized high-power amplifier with an output power of more than one watt on silicon-based optical microchips. This output power is a many times higher than what was previously achievable on this tiny scale and enables the use of high-power on-chip amplifiers in the field of integrated photonics instead of external amplifiers. This would make it much easier ...