BER II and BESSY II User Meeting at HZB
The Innovation Award of Freundeskreis HZB was given to a team of DESY, Hamburg. © HZB
Dr. Nele Thielemann Kühn received the Ernst-Eckard-Koch Award. © HZB
Full house in Bunsen-Auditorium at WISTA, Adlershof. © HZB
Coffee breaks gave valuable time for exchange and to visit also the vendor exhibition. © HZB
More than 600 scientists registered this year for the 9th annual BER II and BESSY II User Meeting from Wednesday to Friday, 13-15 December 2017. The Friends of Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin recognised outstanding work in the field of synchrotron radiation with an Innovation Award, and the best doctoral dissertation with the Ernst-Eckard-Koch prize.
Research with synchrotron radiation was the focus on Wednesday. On Thursday, the „Science Day“, a broad overview on user research was given. The public talk entitled “Interfacing with the brain using organic electronics” found great appeal with the audience: George Malliaras from the University of Cambridge spoke about the potential of organic electronics as brain implants for treating neurological diseases such as epilepsy. New materials and their characterisation at synchrotron sources will play a crucial role in this development. A vendor exhibition by 56 companies on new technical and optical instruments for research was well visited by the scientists.
Highly motivated were all the young scientists who could present their research in Young Scientist Sessions at Wednesday (synchrotron radiation) and Friday (neutron research).
The Neutron Day on Friday offered talks covering new methods and results using neutrons. The satellite workshop entitled “Diffraction Data Processing using DIALS – a practical workshop” took place in parallel.
Poster prizes of HZB Usermeeting
Thursday evening, in the experimental hall at BESSY II, nearly 200 posters from users and HZB scientists were presented. A jury had the difficult task to select the best poster. The poster prize of this HZB usermeeting was given to Katrein Sauer for her Poster on „Fish (Pike) have evolutionary advanced damage resistant bones with layered lamellae different from mammal bones“.
A special poster award in the field of protein crystallography was given by Manfred Weiss and his team to Julia Kratky, University of Leipzig. Her Poster with the title "Structural studies on the substrate and cofactor binding mode of FAD-dependent monooxygenases” presented a new synthesis for the blue dye indigo.
Friends of Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin: Prize ceremony
The Friends of Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin bestowed the Innovation Award upon a team of physicists from DESY, Hamburg: Dr. Bart Faatz, Dr. Evgeny Schneidmiller, Dr. Siegfried Schreiber, Dr. Markus Tischer and Dr. Mikhail Yurkov have been awarded for their work on „Innovative applications of gap-tunable undulators with integrated phase shifters in SASE x-ray FELs“.
The Ernst-Eckard-Koch prize, likewise awarded by the Friends of HZB, went this year to Dr. Nele Thielemann-Kühn her doctoral dissertation (at Uni Potsdam and HZB) on „Optically induced ferro- and antiferromagnetic dynamics in the rare-earth metal dysprosium“.
- Electrocatalysis with dual functionality – an overviewHybrid electrocatalysts can produce green hydrogen, for example, and valuable organic compounds simultaneously. This promises economically viable applications. However, the complex catalytic reactions involved in producing organic compounds are not yet fully understood. Modern X-ray methods at synchrotron sources such as BESSY II, enable catalyst materials and the reactions occurring on their surfaces to be analysed in real time, in situ and under real operating conditions. This provides insights that can be used for targeted optimisation. A team has now published an overview of the current state of knowledge in Nature Reviews Chemistry.
- BESSY II: Phosphorus chains – a 1D material with 1D electronic propertiesFor the first time, a team at BESSY II has succeeded in demonstrating the one-dimensional electronic properties in phosphorus. The samples consisted of short chains of phosphorus atoms that self-organise at specific angles on a silver substrate. Through sophisticated analysis, the team was able to disentangle the contributions of these differently aligned chains. This revealed that the electronic properties of each chain are indeed one-dimensional. Calculations predict an exciting phase transition to be expected as soon as these chains are more closely packed. While material consisting of individual chains with longer distances is semiconducting, a very dense chain structure would be metallic.
- What vibrating molecules might reveal about cell biologyInfrared vibrational spectroscopy at BESSY II can be used to create high-resolution maps of molecules inside live cells and cell organelles in native aqueous environment, according to a new study by a team from HZB and Humboldt University in Berlin. Nano-IR spectroscopy with s-SNOM at the IRIS beamline is now suitable for examining tiny biological samples in liquid medium in the nanometre range and generating infrared images of molecular vibrations with nanometre resolution. It is even possible to obtain 3D information. To test the method, the team grew fibroblasts on a highly transparent SiC membrane and examined them in vivo. This method will provide new insights into cell biology.