A new, versatile plastic-composite sensor can detect tiny amounts of water. The 3d printable material, developed by a Spanish-Israeli team of scientists, is cheap, flexible and non-toxic and changes its colour from purple to blue in wet conditions. The researchers lead by Pilar Amo-Ochoa from the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) used DESY’s X-ray light…
Simulating Meteorite Impacts in the Lab
A U.S.-German research team has simulated meteorite impacts in the lab and followed the resulting structural changes in two feldspar minerals with X-rays as they happened. The results of the experiments at DESY and at Argonne National Laboratory in the US show that structural changes can occur at very different pressures, depending on the compression…
World’s Strongest Bio-Material Outperforms Steel And Spider Silk
At DESY’s X-ray light source PETRA III, a team led by Swedish researchers has produced the strongest bio-material that has ever been made. The artifical, but bio-degradable cellulose fibres are stronger than steel and even than dragline spider silk, which is usually considered the strongest bio-based material. The team headed by Daniel Söderberg from the…
Laser Metronome Achieves Record Synchronization
Scientists at DESY have set up the world’s most precise ‘metronome’ for a kilometre-wide network. The timing system synchronizes a 4.7-kilometer-long laser-microwave network with 950 attoseconds precision. An attosecond is a quintillionth of a second, or a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second. Such installations can provide the beat for recording…
Scientists Shrink Electron Gun to Matchbox Size
In a multi-national effort, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from DESY and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has built a new kind of electron gun that is just about the size of a matchbox. Electron guns are used in science to generate high-quality beams of electrons for the investigation of various materials, from biomolecules…
Supercomputer Comes Up With A Profile Of Dark Matter
In the search for the mysterious dark matter, physicists have used elaborate computer calculations to come up with an outline of the particles of this unknown form of matter. To do this, the scientists extended the successful Standard Model of particle physics which allowed them, among other things, to predict the mass of so-called axions,…
Record High Pressure Squeezes Secrets Out of Osmium
An international team of scientists led by the University of Bayreuth and with participation of DESY has created the highest static pressure ever achieved in a lab. Using a special high pressure device, the researchers investigated the behavior of the metal osmium at pressures of up to 770 Gigapascals (GPa) – more than twice the…
Photo of the Day: X-Ray Pulses Uncover Free Nanoparticles for the First Time in 3-D
For the first time, a German-American research team has determined the three-dimensional shape of free-flying silver nanoparticles, using DESY’s X-ray laser FLASH. The tiny particles, hundreds of times smaller than the width of a human hair, were found to exhibit an unexpected variety of shapes, as the physicists from the Technical University (TU) Berlin, the…
X-Ray Pulses Uncover Free Nanoparticles for the First Time in 3-D
For the first time, a German-American research team has determined the three-dimensional shape of free-flying silver nanoparticles, using DESY’s X-ray laser FLASH. The tiny particles, hundreds of times smaller than the width of a human hair, were found to exhibit an unexpected variety of shapes, as the physicists from the Technical University (TU) Berlin, the…
X-Ray Laser Spies Deep into Giant Gas Planets
Using DESY’s X-ray laser FLASH, researchers took a sneak peek deep into the lower atmospheric layers of giant gas planets such as Jupiter or Saturn. The observations of the team around lead author Dr. Ulf Zastrau from the University of Jena reveal how liquid hydrogen becomes a plasma, and provide information on the material’s thermal…
Faster X-Ray Technology Paves the Way for Better Catalysts
By using a novel X-ray technique, researchers have observed a catalyst surface at work in real time and were able to resolve its atomic structure in detail. The new technique, pioneered at DESY’s X-ray light source PETRA III, may pave the way for the design of better catalysts and other materials on the atomic level.…