HZB Newsroom

The International Summer School on Photovoltaics and New Concepts of Quantum Solar Energy Conversion (Quantsol) will be held in September 1-8, 2024 in Hirschegg, Kleinwalsertal, Austria. The school is organised by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and the Technical University of Ilmenau. Applications can be submitted through the school’s homepage until Friday 31^st of May 2024, 23.59h CET.

How can solar cells be produced even more efficiently? Why is "green" hydrogen so important for our future? Why does Berlin need an accelerator to screen materials? The answers are available at the Long Night of the Sciences. On July 2, 2022, 5 p.m. to midnight, HZB opens its doors at the Adlershof site and invites young and old to experiment.

A new experimental station has been opened at the X-ray source SESAME in Jordan: HESEB, the Helmholtz-SESAME Beamline, has been designed by five research centres of the Helmholtz Association under the leadership of DESY. It considerably expands the experimental possibilities of the facility.

The company Sasol and Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) will lead a consortium to develop and optimise next-generation catalysts that will play a key role in decarbonising the aviation sector through sustainable aviation fuels (SAF).

The International Summer School on Photovoltaics and New Concepts of Quantum Solar Energy Conversion (Quantsol) will be held in September 2022 in Hirschegg, Kleinwalsertal, Austria. Applications can be submitted through the school’s homepage until June 7^th 2022. The school is organised by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and the Technical University of Ilmenau.

HZB is an employer that comprehensively strengthens and cares for the diversity of its employees. HZB publicly acknowledges this by signing the Diversity Charter. The charter is run by an association that works to anchor diversity in the working world.

2021 was not an easy year for international research: owing to lockdowns and travel bans, science was hit hard by the pandemic situation. Nevertheless, experiments continued at a high level at the BESSY II light source in Berlin Adlershof – thanks in part to new remote service offers. Here are the figures at a glance.

On February 17, 2022, the Adlershof Dissertation Prize was awarded for the 20th time. Dr. Amran Al-Ashouri (3rd from right) from the HZB young investigator research group "Perovskite tandem solar cells" received the prize endowed with 3,000 euros. The physicist is researching how new organic contact layers can be used to optimize highly efficient perovskite silicon tandem solar cells.

„Die BILD-Zeitung setzt mit dem Beitrag „Die Lockdown-Macher“ vom 4. Dezember 2021 ihre im vergangenen Jahr begonnene einseitige Berichterstattung gegen Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler fort, die ihre fachliche Expertise in den Dienst von Politik und Gesellschaft stellen, um der Coronavirus-Pandemie und ihren gerade in diesen Tagen dramatisch sichtbaren Folgen zu begegnen.

At the end of 2019, the Berlin neutron source BER II was shut down as scheduled. To ensure that the high-quality instruments can continue to be used for research, they are moving to suitable neutron sources in Germany and abroad. Now, another move has been agreed upon: The Very Small Angle Scattering Instrument (VSANS) will find a new home at the Breazeale Research Reactor at Penn State University, USA, in spring 2022.

Three research centres in the Helmholtz Association have developed a joint future plan for the research conducted at the scientific light sources they operate in Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden. The upgrades proposed in the strategy for their world-class accelerator-based facilities will strengthen Germany as a research location and promote innovations in many different fields. The strategy paper was presented on 28 June at the Helmholtz Symposium “Research Infrastructures of the Future” as a component of the Helmholtz Roadmap.

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.

On 19 February 2021, the 4000th eye tumour patient received irradiation with protons, performed by a joint team from Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) and Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin. The number of patients treated in 2020 remained at the previous year's level despite the more difficult corona conditions. The treatment in Berlin-Wannsee is only available for uveal melanomas of the eye. The proton accelerator at HZB is the only therapy site for this disease in Germany.

The Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and two Max Planck institutes are building a catalysis research platform named CatLab to achieve leaps of innovation in hydrogen research

Hydrogen as a sustainable fuel source will play a key role in our energy system for the future. Hydrogen-based chemical energy media are needed as long-term storage repositories in the energy system and are crucial for climate-neutral design of industrial processes. The German federal government's National Hydrogen Strategy clearly identifies the great need for research in this area, which will be the foundation for breakthroughs and leaps in innovation. The Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) and two Max Planck institutes – the Fritz Haber Institute (FHI) and the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion (MPI CEC) – are pooling their expertise for this purpose and together with Humboldt Universität zu Berlin they are jointly establishing the CatLab research platform in Berlin. CatLab is intended as a bridge between pure research and industry, and is being funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with more than 50 million euros. In total, the five-year development project will cost about 100 million euros.

The University of Kassel and Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin are setting up a joint laboratory for the use of artificial intelligence, where they will be developing new experimental methods and improving the analysis of data from experiments performed at BESSY II.

Since September 2020, the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin is again a member of IGAFA - the Initiative of Non-University Research Institutions in Adlershof. Prof. Dr. Jan Lüning, scientific director of the HZB, was elected to the association's board.

In order to develop efficient opto-electronic devices such as solar cells or LEDs, it is crucial to improve the quality of the semiconductors. To achieve this, it is necessary to determine the luminescence yield of the semiconductor material. For this characterization, a research team at HZB has developed a new measuring device that precisely determines the luminescence and is also very compact. In order to evaluate the potential for commercial applications, the team now receives a Field Study Fellowship from the Helmholtz Association.

The meadows are lush green, the ice saints (almost) over: Now is the perfect time for the sheep and goats to return from their winter quarters! Until late autumn, they will now graze the near-natural HZB campus in Wannsee and serve the natural preservation of the landscape - completely without a lawn mower.

The Berlin biotech company Molox GmbH and a team at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) have initiated a consortium of regional research groups and BASF. Together, they want to identify a starting point for the development of a potential active substance against the new coronavirus. Targets of potential inhibitors will be SARS-CoV2 proteins that promote the spread or infectivity of the viruses. Scientists from Freie Universität Berlin are also involved in the research work.

On April 6, 2020 Freie Universität Berlin appointed Johannes Reuther to the joint W2 professorship "Theory of Novel Quantum Materials”. The physicist will conduct research at both Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) and Freie Universität Berlin. The joint appointment will build a bridge between experimental and theoretical physics.

For more than 20 years, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) have jointly offered the irradiation of eye tumors with protons. In 2019, more patients were treated in Berlin-Wannsee than ever before. 276 patients - 20 percent more than in the previous year - underwent proton therapy. The treatment is specialized in choroidal melanomas of the eye. The proton accelerator at HZB is the only treatment facility for this disease in Germany. 

Last week a new detector was installed at one of the three MX beamlines at HZB. Compared to the old detector the new one is better, faster and more sensitive. It allows to acquire complete data sets of complex proteins within a very short time.

Many guests from politics and academia and employees attended the colloquium on January 13, 2020, at Freie Universität Berlin. They joined us to say goodbye to the exciting and highly productive time of neutron research at BER II.

Climate change and its causes are undisputed. But how do we get from knowledge to action? What can science contribute to this? On Thursday, 5.12.2019 at 17:00 Clara Mayer (Fridays for Future), Volker Quaschning (HTW Berlin and Scientists for Future), Bernd Rech (scientific director of the HZB) and Kira Vinke (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research) will discuss these questions. The event takes place in the Bunsen lecture hall of WISTA in Adlershof and is open to the public. Admission is free.

Klaus Lips (HZB) and Jens Anders (Univ. of Stuttgart) have won the 2019 HZB Technology Transfer Prize for their electron spin resonance chip that will revolutionise spin analysis (“EPR On A Chip - Eine Revolution in der spinbasierten Analytik“).

Charles ‘Chuck’ S. Fadley, a pioneer in photoemission spectroscopy and internationally renowned Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of California, Davis, and Senior Faculty Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA, passed away on the 1st of August 2019. He remained an active and avid researcher until a few weeks before his death at age 77.

Javier Villalobos has been awarded for the best poster at the International Workshop on Correlated Dynamics in Energy Conversion (IWCE 19) in Göttingen. The doctoral student works in the young investigator group "Oxygen Evolution Mechanism Engineering". His research contributes to a better understanding of electrocatalytic oxygen evolution.

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.

Despite high summer temperatures, the HZB was able to welcome more than 1300 people to the Long Night of Science at Wannsee. This is about 15 percent more than the last time (2017) when the location took part. Visitor magnets were the guided tours through the energy research laboratories and the experimental halls around the research reactor.

In Wannsee, a new laboratory building for organic chemistry (LE building) was built in just one and a half years, which has now been awarded the silver plaque "Sustainable Building". It is the first HZB building to be certified according to the strict criteria. On the ground floor there is a physical-chemical laboratory for the institute "Functional Oxides for Energy-Efficient Information Technologies (EM-IFOX)".

As of 1 June 2019, Prof. Dr. Bernd Rech and Prof. Dr. Jan Lüning are the new scientific directors of Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie. Bernd Rech is responsible for the “Energy and Information” department and Jan Lüning heads the “Matter” department. Thus the HZB Supervisory Board has appointed two internationally recognised experts at the top of HZB.

Once a year the school lab says: Open doors for daycare children! 90 preschool children from five kindergartens experimented in the HZB school lab in Berlin-Adlershof for the nationwide Day of Little Researchers. Using homemade spectroscopes, they studied the properties of light and looked at poster snippets under the microscope. Actions are also planned at the Wannsee site.

Technische Universität Dortmund and Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin have jointly appointed Prof. Adolfo Velez Saiz as a professor of accelerator physics. He heads the Cavity Development workgroup at the HZB institute SRF – Science and Technology. With this appointment, HZB is expanding its expertise in the development of new accelerator technologies.

The sun shines at the South Pole as well – and in summer almost around the clock. Instead of supplying research stations in the Antarctic with crude oil for producing the electricity and heating they need, solar hydrogen could be produced from sunlight in summer as an alternative. Hydrogen has a high energy density, is easy to store, and can be used as fuel when needed later without polluting the environment. An intriguingly simple idea - but one that raises many questions. Matthias May (HZB) and Kira Rehfeld (Heidelberg University) now want to examine how feasible this kind of solar fuel generation might be in Antarctica. The project is receiving financial support from the Volkswagen Foundation.

On 15 May 2019 they arrived at the campus in Berlin-Wannsee: Seven female sheep and two lambs of the domestic sheep breed "Skudde". By autumn, they will graze the semi-natural campus and thus contribute to biodiversity. By doing without extensive mowing, natural wild meadows are to be created that are particularly insect- and bee-friendly.

Prof. Dr. Bernd Stannowski has received and accepted a call for a joint S-Professorship for "Photovoltaics" at the Beuth University of Applied Sciences Berlin. The physicist heads the working group "Silicon Photovoltaics" at the Competence Center Thin Film and Nanotechnology for Photovoltaics Berlin (PVcomB) of the HZB.

Starting in 2019, Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) will be establishing two new Helmholtz Young Investigator Groups and thereby strengthening its competencies in catalysis research. The Helmholtz Association will be funding each group with 150,000 euros annually over a period of five years, and HZB will be matching that sum with its own funds.

"Das Potenzial der Photovoltaik ist nicht mal annähernd ausgereizt", sagt Rutger Schlatmann im Interview. So liege der Wirkungsgrade bei kommerziellen Modulen aktuell bei zirka 20 Prozent. Mit Tandem-Solarmodulen wären bis zu 40 Prozent möglich - und sie ließen sich wahrscheinlich auch wirtschaftlich produzieren. Schlatmann zeigt die Vorteile der Dünnschicht- und der Wafer-Technologie auf und wagt eine Prognose: Welche Technologie wird das Rennen machen? Und unter welchen Bedingungen könnte die Photovoltaik-Produktion nach Deutschland zurückkehren? Lesen Sie mehr im Interview des pv magazine.

Experts from the construction industry, photovoltaic research field, and the financial sector will discuss innovative solutions for solar facades in combination with energy efficiency in buildings and cities in Berlin, March 19th-20th, 2018. Photovoltaics integrated into buildings represent an important component for energy-efficient cities of the future.

Online registration is open until wednesday 14th March. Students are admitted for a reduced fee.

Polymeric carbon nitride is an organic material with interesting optoelectronic properties. As an inexpensive photocatalyst, it can be used to facilitate water splitting using sunlight. Joint research by Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, the University of Rostock, Freie Universität Berlin as well as other partners has now investigated for the first time how light creates charge carriers in this class of materials and established details about charge mobility and lifetimes. They discovered surprising characteristics in their investigations that provide prospects for new applications, in conjunction with graphene for example.

Six Helmholtz Centres are founding a shared infrastructure for developing novel energy materials that will also be available to external users.