Bookmarks (35)

The Wolfgang Pauli Center for Theoretical Physics (WPC), a joint institution of DESY and Hamburg University, hosted a groundbreaking master class on “Invitation to Black Hole Thermodynamics” led by Professor Edward Witten, one of the most influential physicists of our time. Held at DESY from 14 to 17 January, the event attracted more than 300 registered international participants, underscoring the global interest in Witten’s...

Official start of construction: Eva Gümbel, Hamburg State Councillor for Science, Research and Equality, DESY Director Helmut Dosch, Accelerator Director Wim Leemans and other guests of honour laid the foundation stone for DESY's Centre for Accelerator Science and Technology (CAST) today. The new research building will provide DESY with a new centre for accelerator research - one of DESY's strategic core areas.

Researchers at DESY, together with international colleagues, have discovered a new class of enzymes that can be used to uncover previously unknown biological processes. The researchers suspect that these bacterial “diDNases” - the technical term - could play an important role in the immune defense of bacteria. The team recently published their findings in the renowned journal “Nucleic Acids Research”, and the publication was...

Sarah Heim has joined the Institute of Experimental Physics at the University of Hamburg as a professor after a successful application to the Helmholtz programme “Funding of first-time professorial appointments of highly talented female scientists.” She will continue in her role as DESY scientist and started her professorship titled “Physics, with a focus of dark matter and Higgs analysis at ATLAS” in December 2024.

DESY researchers have achieved a major advance in optical microchip production: they have developed a millimeter-sized high-power amplifier with an output power of over one watt - many times more than was previously possible on this tiny scale.

On January 7, 2025, the European Commission has established the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), furthering its mission to become the world’s largest and most powerful observatory for gamma-ray astronomy.

Spectroscopy expert Felix Allum from Stanford University will use DESY’s free-electron laser FLASH for time-resolved X-ray spectroscopic investigations of the dynamics of organic photochemical reactions with potential synthetic applications. He comes to Hamburg through a Humboldt Research Fellowship, a funding programme offered by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for international researchers to conduct long-term research projects in Germany.

Britta Redlich will take over the lead of the Photon Science research division at DESY on 1 January 2025. The Professor of experimental physics was previously Director of the FELIX free-electron laser and the HFML high-field magnetic laboratory at Radboud University in Nijmegen (Netherlands).

The international multi-instrument Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (EHT) reveals new observations of a spectacular gamma-ray flare from the powerful relativistic jet emanating from the centre of the M87 galaxy at multiple wavelengths, potentially leading to a better understanding of how and where particles are accelerated in these kinds of jets.

An international team of scientists, with participation of DESY, has succeeded in producing and directly controlling hybrid electron-photon quantum states in helium atoms. To this end, the team headed by Dr. Lukas Bruder, junior research group leader at the Institute of Physics, University of Freiburg generated specially prepared, highly intense extreme ultraviolet light pulses using the FERMI free electron laser in Trieste, Italy. The...

In the HQML (Hamburg Full Stack Quantum Machine Learning) project, companies and DESY are working together with the DLR QCI to develop a full stack quantum solution for image data processing.

The morning of 27 November was exciting for the ATLAS team at DESY. They reached a major milestone in the construction of an endcap for the new silicon strip detector for the ATLAS experiment at CERN in Geneva. The basic mechanical structure of the endcap (the “skeleton”), which is made of carbon fibre and was built in Amsterdam at the Dutch national particle physics...

How can cancer drugs be delivered safely to their destination? An international team of researchers has been using the X-ray source PETRA III to test a technique for visualising how a drug is distributed inside tumour cells. In the future, this approach could help to develop more targeted and hence more effective cancer therapies. The working group has presented its findings in the journal...

DESY theorist Aditya Pathak has been awarded a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) ― one of the most coveted European research grants for early-career researchers – for his research project TOPMASS. Starting in September 2025, Pathak will lead a group that will work towards strengthening the precision of measurements of the top quark’s mass.

DESY's trainees are the best! Both in Hamburg and in Zeuthen, trainees in various professions are among the most successful in their year. Til Étienne Kaeber, a trainee in Zeuthen, was honoured as the best electronics technician for devices and systems by the Cottbus Chamber of Industry and Commerce. The Hamburg Chamber of Commerce also honoured a total of 64 young talents, including two...

Christoph Heyl, research group leader at DESY and the Helmholtz Institute Jena, has been awarded a prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant, providing him with funding of 2 million euros over five years for his research project ‘Gas Phase Sonophotonics’ – GASONIC. With the highly competitive Consolidator Grants, the European Research Council (ERC) supports excellent scientists in further expanding and consolidating their innovative research and to...

Today, on 26 November 2024, the annual International Cosmic Day (ICD) will take place. This day is dedicated to the unnoticed cosmic particles that flood our universe and constantly surround us on Earth.

A research team at European XFEL and DESY has achieved a major advance in X-ray science by generating unprecedented high-power attosecond hard X-ray pulses at megahertz repetition rates. This advancement opens new frontiers in the study of ultrafast electron dynamics and enables non-destructive measurements at the atomic level. The researchers published their results now in Nature Photonics.

It was only a small ground-breaking ceremony for those involved, but a big step for DESY and Science City Hamburg Bahrenfeld on their way to becoming a beacon for innovation in the west of Hamburg Representatives from DESY, the federal government and the City of Hamburg officially launched the construction of the DESY Innovation Factory.

The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has officially confirmed PETRA IV is participating in the “National Prioritization Procedure for Large-scale Research Infrastructures”. A team from DESY has prepared a short concept according to the BMBF's specifications and submitted it according to schedule by 25 October 2024. The title: PETRA IV - the ultimate 4D X-ray microscope.

An international research team has made a highly unusual discovery in the farthest reaches of space. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), they found a fast-growing supermassive black hole from a very early phase of the universe shortly after the Big Bang. Named LID-568, it raises fundamental questions about our current understanding of supermassive black holes due to its extremely unusual nature. The...

She searches for the unknown, on her way to the next big discovery, with immense precision and boundless enthusiasm: Ludovica Aperio Bella, particle physicist in DESY's ATLAS group since 2020. "My focus is on analysing the data from the ATLAS experiment at CERN," says the Italian scientist. "My research concentrates on precision measurements of fundamental particles and their interactions at the high-energy precision limit."...

A research team has taken a close look at catalytic surfaces at the DESY NanoLab. In doing so, they have not only learnt more about the exact processes that take place during catalysis, but have also tried out ways of positively influencing these processes. The team presents its results in the scientific journal ACS Nano.

Scientist Thomas Marlovits (DESY/CSSB/UKE) together with three other researchers, Edith Houben from Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, Tracy Palmer from Newcastle University and John McKinney, PhD, EPFL Lausanne received an ERC Synergy grant for their project ‘CombaT7’, for which they will receive funding of 10.8 millionn euro to be used over a period of six years. The project aims to provide a deep mechanistic understanding...

On October 29th and 30th, 2024, the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY will host the workshop “WG Quantum Computing & Applications: Use cases in Key Verticals” organized by the Quantum Business Network (QBN). The event brings together experts from the academic and industry communities to discuss the latest developments and potential applications of this pioneering technology.

The network Lasers4EU, which helps scientists gain access to laser lab setups across the continent, will now include five laser setups at DESY that specialise in ultrafast science. The setups are based on tabletop lasers that either are pulsed to access the attosecond timescale, or a billionth of a billionth of a second, or that generate secondary radiation that can attain ultrashort processes, or...

The Attosecond Science group at the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science at DESY has developed a novel light source capable of producing extremely short pulses for the investigation of UV-induced molecular dynamics with unprecedented temporal resolution. Scientists from DESY and the University of Hamburg describe their unique observations in Nature Communications.

DESY and numerous Indian research institutes want to work more closely together in the future. To this end, representatives of these institutes have made an agreement during a delegation visit of the German federal government to New Delhi. In the context of the seventh German–Indian governmental consultations and in celebration of 50 years of Indian-German scientific collaboration, a collaboration agreement was signed in the...

A group of scientists from DESY and Universität Hamburg in collaboration with the University of Rochester in the US might be on the trail of something new in the data from the CMS detector, one of the two giant multi-purpose detectors at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva. Focusing on LHC collisions that produce pairs of top quarks, they have found an...

Former DESY scientists Eckhard Elsen and Robert Klanner will be awarded the W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics by the American Physical Society (APS) next spring, the APS announced this week. The two particle physicists are receiving the award for “pioneering work in establishing the HERA physics program and detectors, leadership in HERA physics exploitation resulting in the measurement of the proton´s structure...

Today, DESY and the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) celebrated the official opening of the new Science Data Management Centre (SDMC) building on the DESY campus in Zeuthen. In the presence of Mario Brandenburg, Parliamentary State Secretary at the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Tobias Dünow, State Secretary at the Ministry of Science, Research and Culture of the State of Brandenburg...

An astonishing property of trees is their ability to transport water and dissolved nutrients from their roots all the way up to their crowns, sometimes dozens of metres above, without the need for a mechanical pump. The underlying mechanism is ingenious: trees have a system of fine capillaries through which the water can rise from below the ground to the very tips of their...

A delegation from DESY led by Helmut Dosch, Chairman of the DESY Board of Directors, has travelled to Kyiv to demonstrate its solidarity with the Ukrainian scientific community.

In Paris in mid-September, akick-off meeting for the Astrophysics Centre for Multimessenger studies in Europe (ACME) marked the start of a new European effort in multimessenger astronomy. ACME is funded with 15 million euro from the European Union and coordinated by Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in France and aims to realize an ambitious coordinated European-wide optimization of the accessibility and cohesion...