HZB Newsroom

Freeze casting is an elegant, cost-effective manufacturing technique to produce highly porous materials with custom-designed hierarchical architectures, well-defined pore orientation, and multifunctional surface structures. Freeze-cast materials are suitable for many applications, from biomedicine to environmental engineering and energy technologies. An article in "Nature Reviews Methods Primer" now provides a guide to freeze-casting methods that includes an overview on current and future applications and highlights characterization techniques with a focus on X-ray tomoscopy.

The IRIS infrared beamline at the BESSY II storage ring now offers a fourth option for characterising materials, cells and even molecules on different length scales. The team has extended the IRIS beamline with an end station for nanospectroscopy and nanoimaging that enables spatial resolutions down to below 30 nanometres. The instrument is also available to external user groups. 

After the egg has been fertilized by a sperm, the surrounding egg coat tightens, mechanically preventing the entry of additional sperm and the ensuing death of the embryo. A team from the Karolinska Institutet has now gained this new insight through measurements at the X-ray light sources BESSY II, DLS and ESRF. 

At the end of February 2024, a team at HZB published an article in Synchrotron Radiation News (SRN). They describe the next development goals for the light source as well as the BESSY II+ upgrade programme and the successor source BESSY III.

Processing materials on the nanoscale, producing prototypes for microelectronics or analysing biological samples: The range of applications for finely focused ion beams is huge. Experts from the EU collaboration FIT4NANO have now reviewed the many options and developed a roadmap for the future. The article, published in “Applied Physics Review”, is aimed at students, users from industry and science as well as research policy makers.

Many enzymes promise to break down plastic. But what works well in the lab often fails on a large scale. Now a new study by Gert Weber, HZB, Uwe Bornscheuer, University of Greifswald, and Alain Marty, Chief Scientific Officer of Carbios, shows how raising the bar for laboratory experiments could help identify promising approaches more quickly. The team demonstrated the new standards on four newly discovered enzymes.

It really is a problem: Microplastics are everywhere. Now, an HZB and University Potsdam team developed a method that for the first time enables us to precisely localise microplastics in soil. The combined 3D tomographies by neutrons and X-rays show exactly the location of particles and structural changes that can affect water flows and soil properties.

X-ray microscopy (cryo-SXT) enables high-resolution insights into cells and cell organelles - in three dimensions. Until now, the 3D data sets have been analysed manually, which is very time-consuming. A team from Freie Universität Berlin has now developed a self-learning algorithm based on a convolutional neural network. In collaboration with experts in cell biology (FU Berlin) and X-ray microscopy at the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin, this algorithm has now been used for the first time to analyse cell components in cryo-SXT data sets. It identified cell organelles and produced highly detailed, complex 3D images within a few minutes.