This requires some skill with a soldering iron: During Girls' Day, girls got to make earrings shine in their favorite colors.
© HZB
83 pupils at Girls'Day at HZB
The girls created some amazing pieces of jewelry!
© HZB
Wearing lab coats, the girls explored the world of electrochemistry.
© HZB
The girls also discovered exciting experiments in the school lab at HZB.
© HZB
How can table tennis balls be packed as tightly as possible—and what does that tell us about the crystal structures of materials?
© HZB
Auf die Details kommt es an: Mädchen beim Mikroskopieren.
© HZB
How can electricity be generated using the sun? Among other things, the students learned how to produce low-cost perovskite solar cells.
© HZB
Amazement at the sight of the accelerator: The Metrology Light Source was shut down specifically to give the students a glimpse inside the accelerator.
© HZB
Tracking down molecules: In the lab, the girls use a microscope for chemical compounds (NMR spectroscopy) to find out which molecules are in their solutions.
© HZ
On 23 April 2026, the annual Girl’s Day took place, giving pupils an insight into various career paths in the fields of science and technology. 83 pupils visited the Adlershof and Wannsee sites and enjoyed a day full of exciting experiments.
By taking part in various workshops, the girls were able to gain an insight into careers such as physicist, engineer and chemist.
Girls’ Day is an important initiative designed to inspire pupils to take an interest in science and technology and to encourage them to pursue careers in these fields.
HZB’s research topics were explored in a fun and engaging way across 16 different workshops.
Wannsee:
- Jules Verne’s dream: water as the coal of the future
- Using colours, electricity and chemistry, we make the invisible visible!
- Kitchen Tetris in the canteen’s shell
- Basics of HTML & CSS
- Atom by atom – thin films for the technology of the future
- Crystals – how are they structured and how can they be studied?
- Creative programming
Smart wires in the student lab
Adlershof:
- Particle accelerators – big and small
- Hot Stuff – solar energy you can touch (almost!)
- Soldering LED earrings
- The daily work of laboratory technicians at HZB and the production of perovskite solar cells
- The power of metadata: tagging, searching, finding!
- Chocolate lithography and what it has to do with solar cells
- Light programming: a creative introduction to programming
- Molecule detectives: searching for clues with NMR
We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to all our colleagues whose dedication helped ensure that Girls’ Day at HZB could take place with such a diverse and exciting range of workshops.
The next opportunity to get to know us and carry out small experiments yourself will be at the Long Night of Science on 6 June at the HZB Adlershof site. With lots of exciting activities especially for children and young people!
- From Curiosity to ContributionEvery morning begins the same way. I put on my lab coat, prepare my electrochemical setup, and wait for the first measurement of the day to appear on my screen. Even though I have repeated the procedure many times over the past weeks, I still find myself wondering: Will today's experiment behave differently from yesterday's?
That question has quietly become my favourite part of my internship at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin.
- Accelerating through accelerator physicsWhen I applied to the International Summer Student Programme at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, I never thought that I would be diving into a whole new, and to me previously unknown, area of physics. Though I have had courses on related topics like mechanics and electromagnetism, accelerator physics also includes special relativity, optics and a whole lot of maths. All these areas of physics are combined in order to calculate, as precisely as possible, the movements of the particles inside the accelerator.
- Green hydrogen with PEC electrolysers: New insights into transport processesOne method of storing solar energy is to use PEC electrolysers to produce hydrogen. However, scaling up this technology remains challenging. Now, a team at the HZB Institute for Solar Fuels has used 2D fluorescence imaging and particle velocimetry to observe the movement of ions and dissolved gases within the electrolyte during electrolysis. These new insights may prove useful in the development of larger PEC electrolysers.