Energiewende

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, Google Inc. and the Paul Scherrer Institute published a new method and data resource that makes connectomic analyses of the entire larval zebrafish brain possible.

Data science (DS) and artificial intelligence (AI) methods opens up an immense range of new opportunities and challenges in the context of continuously enhancing the complex methodologies used as basis for nuclear safety assessments. To this aim, following discussions in the ETSON Technical Board on Reactor Safety, the PSI laboratory for reactor physics and thermal-hydraulics organized on October 20-21, 2022, an international workshop to review and discuss DS/AI within ETSON, the network of European research and expert organizations providing scientific support to national nuclear authorities. With close to 40 participants, the workshop, organized as a hybrid meeting, allowed to put in evidence that similarly as at PSI, a wide and growing range of developments with integration of DS/AI methods are currently taking place in order to complement and/or inform nuclear safety analysis methodologies.  

Light Water Reactors (LWRs) such as the ones operating in Switzerland work at relatively high temperatures and pressures. As a consequence, thermal-hydraulics experiments investigating relevant LWRs phenomena at prototypical conditions require test sections with relatively thick steel walls. This poses significant challenges for the implementation of suitable instrumentation to capture phenomena of interest, such as the flow regimes during transition from liquid to steam. The characterization of flow regimes in the presence of boiling is rather complex, and their better understanding would allow to develop mathematical modeling tools that can be used to optimize equipment and better assess safety margins. To perform in-situ measurements of the boiling process under high-pressure conditions, the team of authors from PSI, ETH, and the University of Michigan has developed a new high-fidelity and high-speed imaging system based on x-ray radiography, which provides high-resolution details on the boiling process while being non-intrusive. Since the instrumentation is located outside of the test section, it has also the advantage that can be easily moved to take measurements in different region of the test sections. 

To celebrate contributions of highly influential early and mid-career researchers in energy research, the journal Energy & Fuels established an annual recognition of Energy and Fuels Rising Stars.

Dr. Manuel Guizar-Sicairos was elected as a 2022 SPIE Fellow Member for his contributions to coherent lensless imaging, including ptychography and X-ray nano-tomography. The distinction was awarded in the SPIE’s Optics & Photonics conference in San Diego, California.

Spinons are well-known as the elementary excitations of one-dimensional antiferromagnetic chains, but means to realize spinons in higher dimensions is the subject of intense research. Here, we use resonant x-ray scattering to study the layered trimer iridate Ba₄Ir₃O₁₀, which shows no magnetic order down to 0.2 K. An emergent one-dimensional spinon continuum is observed that can be well-described by XXZ spin-1/2 chains with magnetic exchange of ∼55 meV and a small Ising-like anisotropy. With 2% isovalent Sr doping ...

Many complex metals exhibit collective states in which electrons appear to collaborate to generate novel and frequently functional behavior. These states develop when metals are cooled down to remove the effects of thermal fluctuations, enabling collective states in which electrons move coherently through the material. These collective electronic states are of tremendous importance because they are the foundation for many quantum states of interest such as unconventional superconductivity, frustrated magnetism, hidden order, as well as topologically non-trivial and electronic-nematic states.