A highlight of the visit is the tour of the BESSY II experimental hall. Here, the Deputy Prime Minister (3rd from left) discovers the endstations of the X-ray source with the Scientific Director Bernd Rech (4th left).
© C. Collado / HZB
Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore visits HZB
At the beginning of the visit, Bernd Rech introduces the Helmholtz Association and HZB's research as well in Adlershof as in Wannsee.
© C. Collado / HZB
The Deputy Prime Minister follows Andreas Jankowiak's presentations with great interest. In the control room of BESSY II, the accelerator expert introduces the guests to how the light source works.
© C. Collado / HZB
The first stop in the experimental hall is the hutch of the macromolecular crystallography research group. Manfred Weiss reports, among other things, on the research that led to the decoding of the three-dimensional structure of the main protease of the SARS-CoV2 virus.
© C. Collado / HZB
This is the size of the pin on which a crystal is mounted where the brilliant X-ray light (synchrotron light) shines through. This allows researchers to peer into the matter and better understand its secrets.
© C. Collado / HZB
The second stop at BESSY II brought the delegation to EMIL (Energy Materials In-Situ Laboratory Berlin).
© C. Collado / HZB
With humour and Lego, Steffi Hlawenka brings thin-film technology closer to the guests and reports on the new research platform for catalysis: CatLab.
© C. Collado / HZB
In bright sunshine, the delegation learned about new technologies in the field of photovoltaics and solar cells.
© C. Collado / HZB
Postdoc Jiahuan Zhang proudly presents a solar cell developed in her group that currently holds a world record with an efficiency of almost 30 per cent.
© C. Collado / HZB
At the end, the participants exchange ideas about research and R&D in Germany and Singapore. They agree that they would like to build on these fruitful discussions and envisage future projects.
© C. Collado / HZB
A group picture with the delegation and all those involved from the HZB.
Thank you very much for your visit, Heng Swee Keat!
© C. Collado / HZB
On Friday, 17 June, a delegation from Singapore visited HZB. Heng Swee Keat, Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore, was accompanied by the Ambassador to Singapore in Germany, Laurence Bay, as well as representatives from research and industry.
It is the Prime Minister's first trip to Europe since the start of the pandemic. Before his stop in Berlin, he was in the UK, including London Tech Week and the Oxford Science Park.
The delegation led by Heng Swee Keat got some insights into HZB's energy and materials research as well as the science conducted at BESSY II light source and in the new catalyst laboratory CatLab.
All participants were delighted about the fruitful discussions and would like to deepen the scientific exchange between the two countries.
- 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.