HZB doctoral student won Young Scientist Award
Silvio Künstner (2nd from right) was awarded with five other young researchers at the EUROISMAR 2019 conference. © EUROISMAR 2019
The "Journal of Magnetic Resonance" and the ISMAR (International Society of Magnetic Resonance) awarded Silvio Künstner with a Young Scientist Award for his talk "Rapid Scan EPR-on-a-chip". The doctoral student from the HZB institute for Nanospectroscopy presented current progress in the development of a miniaturized electron spin resonance spectrometer.
Electron spin resonance or electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) provides detailed information about the inner structure of materials, down to an atomic level. This understanding of the material is essential for research in the field of renewable energies, such as efficient solar cells or battery electrodes. Of particular importance are experiments under real process conditions (operando measurements).
The chip-sized miniaturized EPR spectrometer presented by Silvio Künstner is so small that it can be inserted directly inside the sample. This improvement simplifies the handling of operando measurements significantly. In addition, EPR-on-a-chip is far more sensitive than conventional instruments. Next to the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin, the University of Stuttgart, the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion, as well as the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Bruker (as part of the BMBF's "EPRoC" project) are involved in the research of the miniature spectrometer.
Silvio Künstner received the Young Scientist Award at the ISMAR EUROMAR Joint Conference (25 - 30 August 2019) in Berlin, which was attended by more than 1000 scientists. At the world's largest conference in this field, the HZB was involved as co-organizer. Furthermore, researchers of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin participated with more than ten presentations.
- Two winning entries from the HZB in the Helmholtz Imaging ContestA time resolved X-ray tomography by Paul H. Kamm, HZB, has won the second Jury prize and is the winner of the Helmholtz Imaging conference Partizipants Choice Award in this year’s competition. It shows a 3D snapshot of a laser welding process. Among the 20 most beautiful images is also a microscopy image of a solar cell by Yannic Kerkhoff and Daniel Abou Ras, HZB.
- Israel Ibukun Olaniyan receives the Helmholtz Doctoral Prize 2026At Helmholtz, more than 8,000 doctoral candidates conduct research. Eleven of them have now been honored for their original and outstanding work, among them Dr Israel Ibukun Olaniyan from the HZB. His doctoral thesis "Ferroelectricity at the nanoscale in epitaxial BaTiO3 on silicon" in the group of Professor Catherine Dubourdieu represents a step towards a new nanoelectronics based on topological defects, that can potentially help to create an energy efficient information technology.
- Only at BESSY II worldwide: IR nanoscopy at very long THz wavelengthsThe team at the IRIS beamline at BESSY II has created a new experimental option: They achieved infrared nanoscopy with a spatial resolution of around 50 nm at very long THz wavelengths. This was possible thanks to a temporal pattern of light pulses known as the low-alpha operating mode at BESSY II. Worldwide, BESSY II is the only synchrotron light source at which users could perform nanoscopy in a single setup from 25 to 4000 cm-1, a unique opportunity for ultra-broadband characterisation of complex materials at the nanoscale in both the life sciences and materials sciences.