Research on Covid-19

Alzheimers disease is one of the major global health challenges. Neuronal cell dysfunction and death are connected to the self-assembly of the amyloid β peptide (Aβ42) into oligomeric and fibrillar aggregates. The fibril surface can catalyze the formation of toxic oligomers via secondary nucleation.

We investigated the superconducting properties of the topological superconductor α-PdBi₂ at ambient and external pressures up to 1.77 GPa using muon spin rotation experiments. The ambient pressure measurements evince a fully gapped s-wave superconducting state in the bulk of the specimen. Alternating current magnetic susceptibility and muon spin rotation measurements manifest a continuous suppression of T_c with increasing pressure.

_{Ammonium sulfate has been used as a probe for aerosol particles and investigated in situ by means of ambient pressure X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Unexpectedly, when the particles start to absorb water, a spontaneous redox reaction leading to nitrogen and elemental sulfur takes place.}

Hard X-ray cryo-tomography scanning of retina from healthy and inherited blindness specimen paves the way for correlative analysis after imaging at the cSAXS beamline.

Lithium fluoride is an important material which is technologically exploited in spintronics and organic light emitting devices. It turns out that there is a vast difference between the morphologies of ultrathin lithium fluoride grown on the (100) facet of a silver single crystal.  At room temperature dendrites are obtained while at elevated temperature lithium fluoride forms square islands. The system is an interesting model to study the crossover between diffusion limited aggregates and island growth.

A split-and-delay line for XFEL pulses has been built and successfully tested by a team of researchers at the Linac Coherent Light Source. Key X-ray optical elements are two diamond diffraction gratings made at the Paul Scherrer Institut that are used to split and later recombine the intense ultrashort X-ray laser pulses for time-resolved measurements.

CrI₃ has raised as an important system to the emergent field of two-dimensional van der Waals magnetic materials. However, it is still unclear why CrI₃ which has a ferromagnetic rhombohedral structure in bulk, changed to anti-ferromagnetic monoclinic at thin layers. Here we show that this behaviour is due to the coexistence of both monoclinic and rhombohedral crystal phases followed by three magnetic transitions at T_C1 = 61 K, T_C2 = 50 K and T_C3 = 25 K.

SwissFEL is a compact, high-brilliance, soft and hard X-ray Free Electron Laser (FEL) facility laser composed of two parallel beam lines seeded by a common linear accelerator (LINAC), and a two-bunch photo-injector. For the injector, an innovative dual-photocathode laser scheme has been developed based on state-of-the-art Ytterbium femtosecond laser systems. We just published an overview of the the SwissFEL Photo Cathode Drive Lasers (PCDL) performance, pulse shaping capabilities as well as the versatility of the systems, which allow many different modes of operation of SwissFEL [1]. The full control over the SwissFEL electron bunch properties via the unique architecture of the PCDL will enable in the future the advent of more advanced FEL modes; these modes are, but not restricted to, the generation of single or trains of sub-fs FEL pulses, multi-color FEL and finally the generation of fully coherent X-ray pulses via laser-based seeding.

A team of the Leibniz Institute for Solid State Research (IFW) from Dresden, Germany, led by Dr Alexey Popov has now demonstrated a record blocking temperature of 28 Kelvin at which the magnetic bistability still survives in a submonolayer of a chemically functionalized species of endofullerenes. In this research, X-ray magnetic circular dichroism measurements at low temperatures and high magnetic field at the X-Treme beam line are crucial. The results pave the way toward using such single-molecule magnets as information carriers or magnetic bits.