Uppsala Berlin Joint Laboratory “Our willingness to cooperate is our strength”
Great political interest for the new Uppsala Berlin Joint Laboratory (UBjL): On the 4th of November, Sweden’s ambassador in Germany, Dr. Lars Danielsson, came personally to the HZB where the UBjL is established for the inauguration of the joint project.
“Many parts of the world are currently regarded as more dynamic than Europe,” Dr. Danielsson said in his opening speech: “But we have great strengths – namely our skill and our willingness to cooperate.” These strengths, the ambassador continued, can be seen clearly in the UBjL: “Such excellent joint research projects lead to results that will bring great benefits to society, our children and our grandchildren.” Dr. Danielsson then gave the symbolic start signal for two experimental stations that will be supervised by the Swedish-German workgroup belonging to the UBjL.
The “Uppsala Berlin Joint Laboratory” is headed by Professor Nils Mårtensson, University of Uppsala, and Professor Alexander Föhlisch, Head of the HZB Institute “Methods and Instrumentation for Synchrotron Radiation Research. “We are very proud that Professor Mårtensson has invested resources from this ERC Advanced Grant in the UBjL,” HZB Scientific Director Prof. Dr. Anke Kaysser-Pyzalla said at the opening. This funding, co-financed by the HZB, has allowed the development of worldwide unique study methods for functional materials.
These methods are based on angle-resolved time-of-flight electron spectroscopy (ARTOF) and MHz pulse extraction at BESSY II. The ARTOF instruments were developed in Sweden by the University of Uppsala and the company Scienta-Omicron in close collaboration with the HZB. “The synchrotron source BESSY II delivers pulses with the most suitable time structure worldwide for optimally using the instruments,” said Svante Professor Svante Svensson, who is part of the UBjL team at BESSY II in Berlin. At the UBjL, the researchers can study the state of functional materials at the lowest possible X-ray dosage. Further methods allow detailed detection of the electronic structure of materials.
- Ultrafast demagnetisation - Thinner iron, stronger effectThe thinner an iron film, the more easily it can be demagnetised by a laser pulse. Researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen, working with Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and other partners, have discovered why: the key lies in the magnetic order at the material's interfaces. In the long term, these findings could contribute to the development of new technologies for magnetic data storage. The results have been published in the scientific journal Advanced Science.
- Blind spot for the arrangement of atomsArtificial intelligence is increasingly being used to predict the properties of new materials. A research team from Jena and the United States now shows in a study published in the journal Nature Computational Science that when language models are used for this purpose, they reliably identify which types of atoms a material contains. However, they make insufficient use of information about how those atoms are arranged in space. Neither larger models nor additional training data resolve this weakness. For material properties that depend strongly on structure, AI models specifically designed to process spatial relationships are therefore the more reliable choice. (DOI: 10.1038/s43588-026-01045-2)
- Patterns of polar vortices in lead-free superlattices on siliconA team at HZB has, for the first time, reported polar vortices in (BaTiO3/SrTiO3)10 superlattices on silicon. These results expand the range of materials and substrates on which polar topological textures can occur and open up new options for incorporating complex ferroelectric states into silicon-based technologies.