Virtual tours: Experience the HZB in 360 degrees!
Unfortunately, due to Corona, we are currently unable to receive groups of visitors at HZB and guide them through our centre. Despite Corona, we would like to provide you with insights into HZB. Simply follow our 360-degree tours and experience how we conduct research at the BESSY II accelerator. Further tours are being planned.
"Make yourself comfortable and start your own virtual tour through our world of research! We invite you to move through the 360-degree worlds and pause at one station or another to discover something new," says Sandra Fischer from the Communications Department. She designed and realised the tours together with an external partner.
The first tour is through the BESSY II accelerator facility. Further tours, also at the Wannsee site, are being planned. "With this offer, we want to remain open to interested people even in times of a pandemic and arouse curiosity about the world of science."
Tour through the BESSY II accelerator: Follow the path of light
Have you always wanted to walk through an accelerator? The tours "The Path of Light" and "The Experiment" both start in the heart of BESSY II, the control room. Go to the place where electrons race through and emit light at almost the speed of light - the storage ring tunnel. There you will see the effort that has to be made to generate the coveted light. You can experience all the things we can explore with this light in the tour "The Experiment".
Here you get to the tour. We hope you enjoy it!
Note for our cooperation partners at BESSY II:
360-degree views ("spherical panoramas") of various beamlines are available in the media library. You are welcome to use these to explain your work at BESSY II (e.g. in lectures or for groups of visitors). If you have any questions, please contact Sandra Fischer.
- 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.