New stainless steel for safe transport and storage of hydrogen

Passivation strategy overcomes corrosion and hydrogen embrittlement

17-Feb-2026 - Hydrogen is a cornerstone of future climate-neutral energy systems. Yet storing and transporting hydrogen safely remains a major materials challenge. Stainless steels are attractive candidates because they are strong, affordable and widely used. Even advanced grades, however, are vulnerable to ...

Seeing How Atoms Vibrate at the Angstrom Scale

12-Feb-2026 - Probing the vibration of atoms provides detailed information on local structure and bonding that define material properties. Tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (TERS) offers extremely high resolution to probe such vibrations. Krystof Brezina and Mariana Rossi from the MPI for the Structure and ...

Formic acid in focus

An artificial key enzyme opens up the conversion of CO2 via formic acid to raw materials

18-Dec-2025 - Formate, the salt of formic acid, is seen as an important future pivot for sustainable biotechnologies. A team at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology has developed an enzyme that efficiently converts formate to formaldehyde. This is crucial for the sustainable conversion of CO2 ...

Higher, faster, further with solid-state batteries

New findings on space charge effects could improve efficiency

17-Dec-2025 - In the future, solid-state batteries could store electricity more efficiently and safely than today's batteries with liquid electrolytes. Space charges that form in solid-state batteries have so far impaired their performance. * Space charges form primarily at the positive terminal of the ...

New microscope can image an invisible 2D material

10-Dec-2025 - Researchers from the Physical Chemistry and Theory departments at the Fritz Haber Institute have found a new way to image layers of boron nitride that are only a single atom thick. This material is usually nearly invisible in optical microscopes because it has no optical resonances. To resolve ...

First synthesis of open-chain N-stereogenic amines achieved

Study enables enantiomerically pure products for drug development.

26-Nov-2025 - Researchers at the Max Planck Institut für Kohlenforschung have developed a method for synthesizing stable, chiral open-chain amines with chirality on nitrogen, a previously elusive task. Their work utilizes a new catalytic reaction with a confined chiral catalyst. A research team from Prof. ...

When Electrons Sing in Harmony — and Sense the Shape of Their Home

Hamburg researchers observe shape-sensitive quantum coherence in star-shaped Kagome structures

03-Nov-2025 - Physicists at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) in Hamburg have discovered a striking new form of quantum behavior. In star-shaped Kagome crystals—named after a traditional Japanese bamboo-basket woven pattern—electrons that usually act like a noisy crowd ...

No more problems with reflective surfaces

Max Planck start-up nanoAR receives funding from "exist"-Forschungstransfer

16-Oct-2025 - Most people have been irritated by the reflection of sunlight on their smartphone display or their spectacles. Many solutions are available — but until now none for curved surfaces or situations with a wide range of light incidence angles. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Medical ...

Innovative battery technology from Mülheim

Start-up "Minerva Carbon" receives 1.8 million euros in funding from EXIST Research Transfer I

22-Aug-2025 - The Mülheim-based deep tech start-up Minerva Carbon has received around 1.8 million euros in funding from the EXIST program of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. The project was initiated by Abdu Bilican, a former doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Coal ...

Super-resolution X-ray technique uncovers atomic structures

New method promises enhanced understanding of chemical reactions and material properties by applying a Nobel-prize winning technique in spectroscopy

23-Jul-2025 - Researchers from the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, USA, along with the Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik (MPIK) in Heidelberg and the European X-ray Free Electron Laser (European XFEL) in Hamburg, developed an innovative approach to X-ray spectroscopy, achieving unprecedented detail ...