Energy transition

Shifting away from nuclear energy, expanding solar and wind power, generating energy from biomass, reducing energy consumption. Switzerland is committed to becoming climate-neutral by 2050. An ambitious goal, which has become more urgent than ever due to the increasingly challenging geopolitical situation. How can a sustainable and resilient energy supply for Switzerland be established over the coming years? What's the optimal way to use renewable energy sources? What new technologies are especially promising? At PSI, researchers are seeking answers to these crucial questions.

How fast can the lattice symmetry of a solid change?

One approach to advance our understanding of the complex interactions between different degrees of freedom in strongly correlated systems is to use time-resolved methods to study the response of a material after it has been driven out of equilibrium. Ultrafast optical techniques have demonstrated considerable potential to unravel the correlations that drive the interesting physics in such materials.

beaud lcmo.png

Watching atoms move: an ultrafast phase transition

One approach to advance our understanding of the complex interactions between different degrees of freedom in strongly correlated systems is to use time-resolved methods to study the response of a material after it has been driven out of equilibrium. Ultrafast optical techniques have demonstrated considerable potential to unravel the correlations that drive the interesting physics in such materials.

Watching atoms move

A complete characterization of the unit cell dynamics of a laser-excited tellurium crystal is demonstrated using femtosecond x-ray diffraction. The analysis offers a quantitative measure of the unit cell dynamics without making any assumptions on the symmetry of the excited-state motion.

Nygard highlight.jpg

Confinement-Induced Orientational Alignment of Quasi-2D Fluids

Extreme confinement is known to induce ordering of the fluid, thereby affecting its properties.

rat brain 3D cover hr.PNG

Advanced phase contrast imaging using a grating interferometer

Conventional absorption based X-ray microtomography can become limited for objects showing only very weak attenuation contrast at high energies. However, a wide range of samples studied in biology and materials science can produce significant phase shifts of the X-ray beam and thus phase contrast X-ray imaging can provide substantially increased contrast sensitivity.

Dil Highlight Intro.jpg

Electrons with opposite spins move in opposite directions

In one dimension, there are only two ways to move: left or right. This leads to some peculiar properties for one-dimensional systems on the atomic scale.

Phonon squeezing

Photon squeezing has been the subject of intense interest in the field of quantum optics, since it serves as a unique demonstration of the quantum nature of light. On a practical level, squeezing offers opportunities to make interferometric measurements much more precise than would normally be allowed by quantum uncertainty limits.

squeezing.jpg

Putting the squeeze on phonons

Photon squeezing has been the subject of intense interest in the field of quantum optics, since it serves as a unique demonstration of the quantum nature of light. On a practical level, squeezing offers opportunities to make interferometric measurements much more precise than would normally be allowed by quantum uncertainty limits. In principle, the physics of squeezing may be applied to many different types of bosons.

Olieric graph.png

A fast selenium derivatization strategy for crystallization and phasing of nucleic acid structures

The growing number of biologically important nucleic acid sequences (DNA and RNA) demands a fast and reliable method for their de novo three-dimensional structure determination. In this work, we described a fast and inexpensive strategy for the crystallization and phasing of structures of nucleic acid and nucleic acid/protein complexes.

renske figure.png

Exciting Heavy Metal

Photocatalysts play an important role in a broad range of applications, from photochemical conversion of light energy into chemical energy through to initiating novel chemical reactions. One family of compounds that has attracted much attention is the dinuclear d8-d8 platinum, rhodium and iridium complexes that have a highly reactive electronic excited state.

Femtosecond molecular spin crossover

X-ray absorption spectroscopy is a powerful probe of molecular structure, but it has previously been too slow to track the earliest dynamics after photoexcitation. We investigated the ultrafast formation of the lowest quintet state of aqueous iron(II)tris(bipyridine) upon excitation of the singlet metal-to-ligand-charge-transfer (1MLCT) state by femtosecond optical pump/x-ray probe techniques based on x-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES).