"BESSY is of immense importance for Berlin"
During her summer tour, the Senator also visited BESSY II light source. From left to right: A,.Vollmer (spokeswoman for the BESSY II), I. Czyborra (Senator for Science), B. Rech (Scientific Director) and H. Marx (State Secretary for Science). © HZB / Bettina Ausserhofer
At the end of August, the Senator for Research, Health, and Long-Term Care, Dr Ina Czyborra, together with the State Secretary for Science, Dr Henry Marx, ended her summer tour with a visit to HZB in Adlershof. She publicly declared her political support for the new construction of BESSY III.
Ina Czyborra took an afternoon for intensive discussions with scientists and BESSY II light source. The focus was on the versatility of this large and powerful research infrastructure: from the decoding of protein structures to groundbreaking innovations in the field of renewable energies.
Political support for BESSY III
A central topic was the successor source BESSY III (More information). HZB is planning a 4th generation light source with integrated laboratories, which is to be embedded in the Berlin-Adlershof research campus. The Senator expressly supports this project:
"Once again, I have seen cutting-edge research that is attracting worldwide attention. Adlershof has everything that makes Berlin a unique location - science, research and business in proximity, cooperating and benefiting from each other. [...] This makes it even more important to set the course in the Senate's budget deliberations, which begin in September, to ensure that Berlin remains a centre of cutting-edge research with international appeal in the future. Incidentally, we also need BESSY III for this. The continuation of BESSY is of immense importance for Berlin as a research location. That is why I will do everything I can to ensure that this project is continued."
"We are extremely pleased about such a clear commitment to our plans to build BESSY III in Berlin-Adlershof," says Prof. Bernd Rech, Scientific Director of HZB. "The exchange with the Senator for Science underlines how important the dialogue between science and politics is. Especially when it comes to further advancing cutting-edge research in Berlin!"
- 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.
- 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.
- Spin waves inside a nano-oscillator imaged for the first timeFor the first time, researchers have directly imaged the magnetisation dynamics inside a spin Hall nano-oscillator — a nanoscale device that converts direct current into tunable microwave signals and is a promising building block for energy-efficient wireless communication and brain-inspired computing. A Swedish–German team led by the University of Gothenburg and Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) achieved this using time-resolved scanning transmission X-ray microscopy at the MAXYMUS instrument at BESSY II. The results, now published in Advanced Materials, reveal spin-wave features that had escaped previous, indirect measurement techniques.