The electronics industry expects a novel high-performance transistor made of gallium nitride to offer considerable advantages over present-day high-frequency transistors. Yet many fundamental properties of the material remain unknown. Now, for the first time, researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have observed electrons while they were flowing in this promising transistor. For that they used one of the world's best sources of soft X-rays at PSI's Swiss Light Source SLS.

In a quantum spin liquid, the magnetic moments of the constituent electron spins evade classical long-range order to form an exotic state that is quantum entangled and coherent over macroscopic length scales. Such phases offer promising perspectives for device applications in quantum information technologies, and their study can reveal new physics in quantum matter. Quantum spin ice is an appealing proposal of one such state, in which the fundamental ground state properties and excitations are described by an emergent U(1) lattice gauge theory. This quantum-coherent regime has quasiparticles that are predicted to behave like ...

Two-dimensional magnetic systems with continuous spin degrees of freedom exhibit a rich spectrum of thermal behaviour due to the strong competition between fluctuations and correlations. When such systems incorporate coupling via the anisotropic dipolar interaction, a discrete symmetry emerges, which can be spontaneously broken leading to a low- temperature ordered phase. However, the experimental realisation of such two-dimensional spin systems in crystalline materials is difficult since the dipolar coupling is usually much weaker than the exchange interaction ...

The EU co-financed funding program PSI-FELLOW-II-3i addresses international postdocs and offers these researchers the opportunity to perform their innovative scientific project in one of the four attractive scientific fields tackled at PSI: i) materials and matter, ii) life-sciences, iii) energy and environment and iv) accelerator technologies. The application has to be made together with a senior scientist at PSI. Please study the application concept and the eligibility criteria carefully. 
The second call started on September 1, 2018 with deadline on November 30, 2018.
Please keep updated!

On September 12, 2018, representatives of eight European research infrastructures including SINQ at PSI signed the Charter of the League of advanced European Neutron Sources (LENS) at the International Conference of Research Infrastructures, ICRI2018 in Vienna. The signing ceremony marks the establishment of a new strategic consortium of European neutron source facilities with the aim, according to the charter, to “facilitate any form of discussion and decision-making process that has the potential to strengthen European neutron science via enhanced collaboration among the facilities”.
The founding partners in the consortium include both European and national facilities in France, Germany, Sweden, Hungary, the United Kingdom, Norway and Switzerland. Other qualifying facilities are invited to join at any time.
In addition, the proposal for the BrightnESS-2 initiative (Bringing together a neutron ecosystem for sustainable science with ESS) with PSI as one of 15 partner institutions has been accepted by the European Commission, recently. The project aims to foster the long-term sustainability of a vibrant neutron scattering community and a network of complementary facilities in Europe.
The Swiss involvement in both initiatives underlines the strong commitment of the Swiss neutron community in helping to shape the future European neutron landscape as demonstrated by the strong involvement in the European Spallation Source and an extensive upgrade program of the national source.

Recently, a new zero field setup has been installed and tested for the HAL-9500 instrument. This setup allows using the detector system of HAL-9500 with its high time resolution to routinely perform zero field measurements (<20 mG) between 20 mK and room temperature. In addition, it is possible to perform weak transverse field experiments to e.g. determine magnetic volume fractions. The new zero field setup is thought to supplement the high transverse field µSR measurements up to 9.5 Tesla that worldwide can only be performed at HAL-9500.

The Bernina instrument has gone into its first summer shutdown after an exciting time of commissioning and pilot experiments. After a very successful first pilot experiment end 2017, three more experiments were performed which brought Bernina closer to its goal of high selectivity in excitation and measurements for time-resolved experiments. Direct excitation of a phonon, a well defined crystal lattice vibration, was reached by phase-stable THz pulses. Ultrafast changes in magnetic structure were measured by resonant x-ray diffraction, as well as changes in electronic structures were tracked by femtosecond X-ray spectroscopy.

The neutron electric dipole moment (nEDM) search at PSI's ultracold neutron source (UCN) is moving towards the next phase with the new n2EDM apparatus and at least a factor 10 improvement in sensitivity. The first and largest item of the new setup, the magnetically shielded room (MSR), is currently being installed in the UCN experimental area. Six layers of mu-metal and an aluminum RF layer will provide a quasistatic magnetic shielding factor of about 100'000 and more than 1 Million above a few Hz. The innermost shielded room with a volume of about 27m³ will be the largest magnetically ultrasilent room in the world, next to PTB's BMSR-2 in Berlin which is of similar dimension. The environment will allow ultraprecise field monitoring at the femto-Tesla level.

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