In October, Administrative and Managing director Dr. Claudia Burger leaves European XFEL after almost six years. As head of administration she was in charge of finance, controlling, human resources, procurement, legal matters, knowledge management, and establishing the user office for the research facility.
Read more on the European XFEL website
Image: Dr. Claudia Burger. Credit: European XFEL
Butterfly colour has always amazed scientists, who are trying to find the origins of these vivid tones in order to maybe one day be able to reproduce them. Researchers from the University of Sheffield (UK) have come to the ESRF to study the subtle differences in the structural colour elements of Heliconius butterflies, and link them to the genetics that controls these structures.
Image credit: A Heliconius butterfly. Credit: Dany 13. https://www.flickr.com/photos/dany13/11465883596
A study published in Science Advances reveals a half billion year old fabrication concept, employed by nature, which only recently has been used by mankind to produce novel technologically relevant nanomaterials. Using data from three different X-ray imaging and analysis instruments at the ESRF, the European Synchrotron, Grenoble, France, the international team of scientists unravels how living organisms create very complex highly regular glass structures.
Image credit: Electron microscopy image of glass spicules form the sponge Geodia cydonium. Credits : Igor Zlotnikov, B CUBE–Center for Molecular Bioengineering, Technische Universität Dresden
There is a strong correlation between the rise of a civilization and writing. The so-called Information Age developed in parallel with the ability to write, store, and process large amounts of digital data. To keep pace with the increasing demand for data of our days, not only the size but also the speed of digital memories must increase dramatically, while keeping the energy consumption at reasonable levels. In order to achieve that, we must learn to write anew.
Image: Magnetisation switching of a 500 nm diameter Pt/Co/AlOx disc.
Fluid catalytic cracking, a century old chemical conversion process utilizing porous composites of zeolite and clay, up to this day provides the majority of the world’s gasoline. Owing to harsh reaction environments and feedstock impurities the employed catalysts deactivate, necessitating their continuous fractional replacement with major refineries requiring up to 40 tons of fresh catalyst in total on a daily basis. Using a combination of ptychographic, x-ray diffraction and -fluorescence tomography researchers from PSI and ETH elucidated the structural changes behind catalyst deactivation.
Image: Cropped – Ptychographic image reconstructions. a Volume reconstructions of FCC1, FCC2, and FCC3. Orthoslices through the retrieved electron density maps are shown in b–d, respectively. Presented are bottom up (z–x) and orthogonal views (y–z, y–x). Cutting planes are represented by dotted lines. Shown in e–g are enlarged versions of selected areas. Common to all subfigures is the linear grey scale for the electron density. Selected diffusion highways (-) are highlighted in pink, hydrocarbon deposits by a red triangle, and the ASA shell by a blue cross. Voxel size is about (20 nm)3. Scale bars are 5 µm
As part of an international collaboration, scientists at European XFEL have developed and tested a novel approach for processing data from single biological particles such as proteins and viruses. Based on an idea first proposed over 40 years ago, the new method overcomes several problems of traditional approaches and could also have applications for other structural biology methods. The method is published today in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Read more on the European XFEL website
Image: Schematic illustration of the new approach. Many X-ray diffraction snapshots recorded in the XFEL experiment (left) […]. Source: European XFEL website
The latest generation of organic semiconductors display excellent characteristics, with charge mobilities surpassing those of amorphous silicon thin film transistors (TFTs) that are commonly used in today’s flat panel displays. The integration of organic TFTs (OTFTs) into real applications requires high performance and low spread of the electrical characteristics. As transport properties are greatly influenced by the microstructure of the organic layer, single crystalline films offer the greatest potential for high-performance OTFTs.
Image: Schematic illustration of lateral homo-epitaxial growth in which well-ordered zone-cast material provides a template for further deposited molecules.
The commissioning of the MAX IV synchrotron radiation facility in Lund marks the dawn of a new generation of storage-ring-based light sources. This new generation delivers one order of magnitude higher performance and allows realization of groundbreaking experiments on a variety of systems and materials at the atomic and molecular levels. This paper reviews the conceptual basis of the MAX IV design, briefly summarizes the most recent accelerator commissioning results and focusses on exploring a future development path for the MAX IV 3 GeV storage ring aimed at achieving the diffraction limit at hard x-ray wavelengths.
From 18 to 23 September, more than 50,000 science fans visited the 17th edition of the ‘Highlights der Physik’ science festival in Münster. European XFEL was one of 50 exhibitors on hand to engage interested visitors about the newly inaugurated facility.
Read more on the European XFEL website
Image: Visitors to the exhibition were able to get an overview of the European XFEL’s research goals and state-of-the-art technology. Credit European XFEL
Researchers at the Universities of St Andrews and Glasgow have made a significant step forward in tackling a viral disease which causes frequent epidemics in Africa and could spread to Europe due to global warming.
Dr Michal Barski and Dr Uli Schwarz-Linek of the School of Biology at the University of St Andrews, with colleagues at the University of Glasgow, have published a paper in online journal eLife revealing new information about a key molecule used by the virus to cause disease, which could help to eventually find a cure or a vaccine.
When isolated atoms are electronically excited, they have two possible ways of releasing electronic energy: by radiation or by Auger decay. The Auger process, in which the decaying electron transfers its energy to another electron causing it to detach (ionization), has played an important part in modern physics, particularly surface science, because it is by far the strongest decay channel for core holes of light elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. In some cases, the Auger process is energetically forbidden, because the energy being exchanged is not sufficient for ionization. In this case, new electronic mechanisms for deexcitation may be discovered that “borrow” energy from the surroundings. One of these is interatomic Coulombic decay (ICD) where the energy is “borrowed” from surrounding atoms. Another mechanism is laser enabled Auger Decay (LEAD), where the energy is “borrowed” from an ancillary laser field; up to now LEAD has been observed with low-energy photons, meaning that more than one photon must be absorbed to make the process possible.
“This is a very important event, and we are very happy that the first users have now arrived at European XFEL so we can do a full scale test of the facility” said European XFEL Managing Director Prof. Dr. Robert Feidenhans’l. ”The instruments and the supporting teams have made great progress in the recent weeks and months. Together with our first users, we will now do the first real commissioning experiments and collect valuable scientific data. At the same time, we will continue to further advance our facility and concentrate on further improving the integration and stability of the instrumentation” he added.
Read more on the European XFEL website.
Image: The first user group at the FXE instrument. Credit European XFEL
A research team has created for the first time a movie with nanoscale resolution of the three-dimensional changes a virus undergoes as it prepares to infect a healthy cell. The scientists analyzed thousands of individual snapshots from intense X-ray flashes, capturing the process in an experiment at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
From high-school level to post-doctoral fellows, these future professionals have chosen the ESRF to gain that practical experience so valued on a CV. Meet some of our students and find out how their experience at the ESRF is shaping their future.
Emily Galvin, Katie Mordecai and William Spencer are in various stages of a 4-year technical apprenticeship with the STFC in the UK. They have spent three weeks in the ESRF mechanical workshop on a shared project, machining prototype parts from drawings using a computer numeric tool (CNC). The parts, which have been designed in-house, will be used on a slit positioning assembly through which the light beam is concentrated on the beamline.
“The software I’m using is completely new to me and of course it’s all in French, so I’m learning fast!”, says Katie. “These CNC machines are really expensive and I’ve never been allowed to operate one before. My supervisor has been great in showing us how it works and trusting us to use it.”
Magnets are found in motors, in energy production and in data storage. A deeper understanding of the basic properties of magnetic materials could therefore impact our everyday technology. A study by scientists at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI in Switzerland, the ETH Zurich and the University of Glasgow has the potential to further this understanding.
The researchers have for the first time made visible the directions of the magnetisation inside an object thicker than ever before in 3D and down to details ten thousand times smaller than a millimetre (100 nanometres). They were able to map the three dimensional arrangement of the magnetic moments. These can be thought of as tiny magnetic compass needles inside the material that collectively define its magnetic structure. The scientists achieved their visualisation inside a gadolinium-cobalt magnet using an experimental imaging technique called hard X-ray magnetic tomography which was developed at PSI. The result revealed intriguing intertwining patterns and, within them, so-called Bloch points.
At a Bloch point, the magnetic needles abruptly change their direction. Bloch points were predicted theoretically in 1965 but have only now been observed directly with these new measurements. The researchers published their study in the renowned scientific journal Nature.
Image: A vertical slice of the internal magnetic structure of a sample section. The sample is 0.005 millimetres (5 micrometres) in diameter and the section shown here is 0.0036 millimetres (3.6 micrometres) high. The internal magnetic structure is represented by arrows for a vertical slice within it. In addition, the colour of the arrows indicate whether they are pointing towards (orange) or away from the viewer (purple). (Graphics: Paul Scherrer Institute/Claire Donnelly)
