An international team including MPIfR scientists used the APEX telescope to map an area of more than 80 square degrees in the Southern Galactic plane. Spectral lines emitted from several molecules, including the rare isotopes 13CO and C18O of the carbon monoxide molecule, probed the moderately dense component of the interstellar medium. The resulting survey reveals a wide range of structures, from individual star-forming clumps to giant molecular clouds and complexes. This survey allows us to constrain the large-scale distribution…

Joint research work between Chemnitz University of Technology and the Technical University of Dresden under Chemnitz leadership reveals ionic defect landscape in metal halide perovskites – publication in renowned journal Nature Communications The group of so-called metal halide perovskites as materials has revolutionized the field of photovoltaics in recent years. Generally speaking, metal halide perovskites are crystalline materials that follow the struc-ture ABX3, with varying composition. Here, A, B, and X can represent a combination of different organic and inorganic…

How do you cool a large telescope to absolute zero while flying it from a huge balloon at 130,000 feet? Nearly all photons emitted after the Big Bang are now visible only at far-infrared wavelengths. This includes light from the cold universe of gas and dust from which stars and planets form, as well as faint signals from distant galaxies tracing the universe’s evolution to today. Earth’s atmosphere blocks most of this light, and space missions are an ideal but…

A single nanoparticle can act like a laser at low power but still emit a sharp signal. Lasers are used in a range of everyday devices, harnessing the power of light molecules, photons, – lined up to form highly concentrated beams of light – to perform now common tasks such as scanning barcodes and removing tattoos. As biosensing and bio-imaging research seeks to look deep inside tissue to the intracellular level miniaturising laser devices poses significant challenges for these nanoscale…

Fraunhofer IPK and Charité CFM Facility Management GmbH are developing an AI-based system to automatically check trays of surgical instruments for completeness. Everyday life in university hospitals: Surgical instruments are cleaned, disinfected, packed and sterilized in processing units for medical products. Around 3,500 instruments per day are prepared for surgical procedures under the strictest hygiene and quality standards and delivered to the operating rooms. A packing tray with the surface area of an A3 sheet can contain up to 160…

The first experimental observation of three-dimensional magnetic ‘vortex rings’ provides fundamental insight into intricate nanoscale structures inside bulk magnets, and offers fresh perspectives for magnetic devices. Magnets often harbour hidden beauty. Take a simple fridge magnet: Somewhat counterintuitively, it is ‘sticky’ on one side but not the other. The secret lies in the way the magnetisation is arranged in a well-defined pattern within the material. More intricate magnetization textures are at the heart of many modern technologies, such as hard…

A unique stage of planetary system evolution has been imaged by astronomers, showing fast-moving carbon monoxide gas flowing away from a star system over 400 light years away, a discovery that provides an opportunity to study how our own solar system developed. Astronomers have detected fast-moving carbon monoxide gas flowing away from a young, low-mass star: a unique stage of planetary system evolution which may provide insight into how our own solar system evolved and suggests that the way systems…

The Christian Doppler Laboratory for Technology-Guided Electronic Component Design and Characterization investigates ways to better control electromagnetic interactions in smart networked devices, especially in the 5G frequency range. In smartphones and many other complex, wirelessly networked devices, sophisticated technologies are used to integrate the individual electronic components into the housing. While active components, such as semiconductors, are already well investigated, passive electronic elements such as antennas or filters are lagging behind. This is not only the case for the components…

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids and their international colleagues found signatures of an unconventional Hall response in the quantum limit of the bulk metal HfTe5, adjacent to the three-dimensional quantum Hall effect of a single electron band at low magnetic fields. The quantum Hall effect is among the most prominent examples of a quantum phenomenon that occurs on a truly macroscopic scale. Its robust nature renders the quantum Hall effect vastly important for applications….

Physicists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics have tested quantum mechanics to a completely new level of precision using hydrogen spectroscopy, and in doing so they came much closer to solving the well-known proton charge radius puzzle. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) have succeeded in testing quantum electrodynamics with unprecedented accuracy to 13 decimal places. The new measurement is almost twice as accurate as all previous hydrogen measurements combined and moves science one…

Professors from the Department of Physics and Astronomy have created a serpentine path for electrons. A research team led by professors from the Department of Physics and Astronomy have created a serpentine path for electrons, imbuing them with new properties that could be useful in future quantum devices. Jeremy Levy, a distinguished professor of condensed matter physics, and Patrick Irvin, research professor, are coauthors of the paper “Engineered spin-orbit interactions in LaAlO3/SrTiO3-based 1D serpentine electron waveguides,” published in Science Advances…

Jena researchers develop open-source optical toolbox. The open-source system from the 3D printer delivers high-resolution images like commercial microscopes at hundreds of times the price. Modern microscopes used for biological imaging are expensive, are located in specialized laboratories and require highly qualified staff. To research novel, creative approaches to address urgent scientific issues — for example in the fight against infectious diseases such as Covid-19 — is thus primarily reserved for scientists at well-equipped research institutions in rich countries. A…

Borexino detector succeeds in measuring the sun’s CNO fusion cycle. The Borexino Experiment research team has succeeded in detecting neutrinos from the sun’s second fusion process, the Carbon Nitrogen Oxygen cycle (CNO cycle) for the first time. This means that all of the theoretical predictions on how energy is generated within the sun have now also been experimentally verified. The findings are the result of years of efforts devoted to bringing the background sources in the energy range of the…

Physicists from the University of Konstanz, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich) and the University of Regensburg have successfully demonstrated that ultrashort electron pulses experience a quantum mechanical phase shift through their interaction with light waves in nanophotonic materials, which can uncover the nanomaterials’ functionality. The corresponding experiments and results are reported in the latest issue of Science Advances. Nanophotonic materials and metamaterials Many materials found in nature can influence electromagnetic waves such as light in all different kinds of ways. However,…

Researchers used a scanning tunneling microscope to visualize quantum dots in bilayer graphene, an important step toward quantum information technologies. Trapping and controlling electrons in bilayer graphene quantum dots yields a promising platform for quantum information technologies. Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have now achieved the first direct visualization of quantum dots in bilayer graphene, revealing the shape of the quantum wave function of the trapped electrons. The results, published November 23 in Nano Letters, provide important fundamental knowledge needed…

Faster, smaller, smarter and more energy-efficient chips for everything from consumer electronics to big data to brain-inspired computing could soon be on the way after engineers at The University of Texas at Austin created the smallest memory device yet. And in the process, they figured out the physics dynamic that unlocks dense memory storage capabilities for these tiny devices. The research published recently in Nature Nanotechnology builds on a discovery from two years ago, when the researchers created what was…