The proton precisely weighted

20-Jul-2017 - What is the mass of a proton? Scientists from Germany and Japan successfully did an important step towards the most exact knowledge of this fundamental constant. By means of precision measurements on a single proton, they could improve the precision by a factor of three and also correct the ...

A Quantum Low Pass for Photons

Physicists observe novel quantum effect that limits the number of emitted photons

19-Apr-2017 - The probability to find a certain number of photons inside a laser pulse usually corresponds to a classical distribution of independent events, the so-called Poisson-distribution. There are, however, light sources with non-classical photon number distributions that can only be described by the ...

Shedding light on light absorption: titanium dioxide unveiled

One of the most promising materials for light-conversion technology

19-Apr-2017 - The anatase crystal form of Titanium dioxide (TiO₂) is one of the most promising materials for photovoltaic and photocatalytic applications nowadays. Despite years of studies on the conversion of light absorbed by anatase TiO₂, into electrical charges, the very nature of its fundamental ...

How photons change chemistry

17-Mar-2017 - The quantum nature of light does usually not play an important role when considering the chemical properties of atoms or moelcules. In an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences scientists from the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter ...

'Corrective glass' for mass spectrometry imaging

Visualizing the distribution of chemical substances on non-flat samples

10-Feb-2017 - The chemical analysis of biological tissues with three-dimensional shapes has been a major problem so far. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, have now improved mass spectrometry imaging in such a way that the distribution of molecules can also be ...

Gum metals pave the way for new applications

Scientists discover peculiarities in crystal structure of titanium alloy

02-Feb-2017 - Metals which can be bent as gum pave the way for new industrial applications for example in the aerospace industry. These so-called gum metals exist but the mechanism behind this behaviour was still unsettled and thus difficult to be used for applications. Scientists from the Max-Planck-Institut ...

Studying fundamental particles in materials

First observation of Dirac fermions in graphene

19-Jan-2017 - Studying properties of fundamental particles in condensed matter systems is a promising approach to quantum field theory. Quasiparticles offer the opportunity to observe particle properties that have no realization in elementary particles. In the present study, an international research team led ...

Water as the underlying driver of the Earth’s carbon cycle

18-Jan-2017 - Currently terrestrial ecosystems absorb about one quarter of the anthropogenic carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. However, how this land carbon sink will develop in the future is uncertain and strongly depends on the responses of ecosystems to climate. New clues on how the land carbon ...

Self-amplifying chemical mechanism explains severe winter haze events

23-Dec-2016 - In the aqueous phase of aerosol particles, nitrogen and sulfur oxides can react with each other and rapidly form high concentrations of fine particulate matter through a previously unrecognized mechanism. Persistent haze consisting of fine aerosol particles shrouds Beijing and large part of China ...

Protons make waves

AWAKE project reaches important milestone

21-Dec-2016 - Success reported from the AWAKE project: Researchers have succeeded for the first time in generating a wave-shaped plasma field with the aid of a proton beam – an approach which paves the way for a completely new type of particle accelerator. In the future, the scientists involved plan to ...