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Optical fiber tips mounted with different functional nanomaterials (gold nanostructures, porous silicon, stimuli-responsive hydrogels). | Photo: Thomas Roese

With Light and Nanoparticles – Blazing a trail to the future of medicine

In the 21st century, it is often promised, medical treatment will be personalized, with diagnoses and therapies tailored to the needs of the …
Artistic representation of two inspiralling neutron stars shortly before their collision. | Image credit: N. Moldenhauer

Colliding stars reveal fundamental properties of matter and space-time

Combining various observational data of neutron-star collisions with nuclear-physics calculations, Tim Dietrich, Astrophysics Professor at the …
Levke Caesar | Photo: privat

Weakening Gulf Stream – Levke Caesar receives Publication Prize of Leibniz-Kolleg Potsdam 2020

The physicist Dr. Levke Kathrin Caesar is awarded the Publication Prize for young scientists 2020 by the Leibniz-Kolleg Potsdam. Caesar receives the …
Artist‘s view of heat transport in a trilayer metal composite material. | Image credit: Felix Stete/Jan Pudell

Hot Electrons – a very special form of heat transport in metals

When heating a platinum layer on nanometer scales, heat can be transferred by hot electrons through a copper layer into a nickel layer without …
Prof. Dr. Safa Shoaee | Photo: Karla Fritze

New Paths to Solar Energy – Looking for the best material for novel solar cells

The solar cells of the future are made of organic material as they can be produced very inexpensively using printing technologies. Physicists at the …
Schematic representation of a bacterium with two motility modes, push and wrap, swimming towards the source of an attractant. | Image: Dr. Robert Großmann

Freestyle – The combination of swim modes facilitates movement of bacteria

One of the prime challenges of swimming bacteria is to purposefully navigate to find food or flee from poisons. This process, called chemotaxis, …
Turbulence modes identified in the Cygnus X region plotted over the Fermi-LAT gamma-ray map. The color code for signatures: Green - alfvenic; Red - magnetosonic; and Blue - isotropic turbulence. The distance of the object is 1.4 kiloparsec. The radius of the eddy is ~ 15 parsec (1 parsec = 3.26 light years). | Image credit: Zhang et al. 2020 Nature Astronomy

Important new insights into plasma physics and astrophysical phenomena

The role of turbulence in various physical processes is a current hot topic of research. Prof. Dr. Huirong Yan and her team from the Institute of …
Prof. Dr. Sascha Oswald. | Foto: Tobias Hopfgarten

Counting Neutrons for Environmental Research – Researchers measure soil moisture with the help of particles from space

They are super-fast, rich in energy and are created when particles from space hit the Earth - neutrons are omnipresent and usually penetrate matter …
Vittoria Sposini and Samudrajit Thapa in Venice. | Photo: Dr. Fereydoon Taheri

In My Little Chamber – The Difficult Task of Writing a Doctoral Thesis During the Corona Crisis

On the corona pandemic – contributions from the University of Potsdam

Vittoria Sposini from Italy and Samudrajit Thapa from India are PhD students in the Theoretical Physics Group of Prof. Ralf Metzler at the Institute …
Prof. Dr. Markus Gühr | Foto: Antje Horn-Conrad

Snapshots from the Nano Cosmos – How Markus Gühr uses flashes of light to probe the dynamics of molecules

Perhaps it was a sign: Markus Gühr grew up in Gießen. As a boy he used to play in the town’s old cemetery, very close to the place where Wilhelm …