Sixth Joint BER II and BESSY II User Meeting
The annual Joint HZB User Meetings will provide an overview of the many exciting and inspiring research results obtained at our facilities in the past year. The Sixth Joint BER II and BESSY II User Meeting will take place at Berlin-Adlershof from December 3rd to December 5th, 2014. The neutrons session will take place at Berlin-Wannsee on Wednesday, 3rd December, followed by Dinner at Café Jahn.
On Thursday morning, at WISTA, Bunsen Auditorium, Adlershof, Christof Wöll, KIT, will ask in his keynote lecture “What Supramolecular Chemistry can do for Solid State Physics?” The meeting continues with plenary talks, discussions, and a poster session, which will provide vast possibilities of information and discussion. In his public lecture, Christoph Lienau, University Oldenburg, will give an overview on “Solar cells and artificial light harvesting systems”.
Traditional highlights are the bestowals of the Prizes for Young Scientists donated by the “Freundeskreis Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin e. V. “
After hours of inspiring scientific presentations we hope to meet you Thursday evening at the Berliner Buffet. The buffet is sponsored by the companies participating in the accompanying vendor exhibition. As well as this generous gesture the exhibitors will be happy to have the opportunity to inform you on the latest developments in all fields of research equipment.
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- Iridium-free catalysts for acid water electrolysis investigatedHydrogen will play an important role, both as a fuel and as a raw material for industry. However, in order to produce relevant quantities of hydrogen, water electrolysis must become feasible on a multi-gigawatt scale. One bottleneck is the catalysts required, with iridium in particular being an extremely rare element. An international collaboration has therefore investigated iridium-free catalysts for acidic water electrolysis based on the element cobalt. Through investigations with various methods, among them experiments at the LiXEdrom at the BESSY II X-ray source in Berlin, they were able to elucidate processes that take place during water electrolysis in a cobalt-iron-lead oxide material as the anode. The study is published in Nature Energy.
- Catalysis research with the X-ray microscope at BESSY IIContrary to what we learned at school, some catalysts do change during the reaction: for example, certain electrocatalysts can change their structure and composition during the reaction when an electric field is applied. The X-ray microscope TXM at BESSY II in Berlin is a unique tool for studying such changes in detail. The results help to develop innovative catalysts for a wide range of applications. One example was recently published in Nature Materials. It involved the synthesis of ammonia from waste nitrates.
- BESSY II: Magnetic ‘microflowers’ enhance magnetic fields locallyA flower-shaped structure only a few micrometres in size made of a nickel-iron alloy can concentrate and locally enhance magnetic fields. The size of the effect can be controlled by varying the geometry and number of 'petals'. This magnetic metamaterial developed by Dr Anna Palau's group at the Institut de Ciencia de Materials de Barcelona (ICMAB) in collaboration with her partners of the CHIST-ERA MetaMagIC project, has now been studied at BESSY II in collaboration with Dr Sergio Valencia. Such a device can be used to increase the sensitivity of magnetic sensors, to reduce the energy required for creating local magnetic fields, but also, at the PEEM experimental station, to study samples under much higher magnetic fields than currently possible.