Archive

Researchers from Max Born Institute have demonstrated a successful way to control and manipulate nanoscale magnetic bits — the building blocks of…

Spintronics is already widely used in data storage, sensor technology and, increasingly, in communication technology. Many of our cars and cell phones…

The phase and the group velocity of light propagating in conventional optical media cannot exceed the speed of light in vacuum. However, in so-called…

Complex research explained understandable

Kasra Amini has been awarded the prestigious Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). This highly competitive grant is given to…

The entirely new structure of light could help drug developers see their work more clearly than before.

An entirely new structure of light is helping…

Intense laser pulses can be used to manipulate or even switch the magnetization orientation of a material on extremely short time scales. Typically,…

Magnetization can be switched with a single laser pulse. However, it is not known whether the underlying microscopic process is scalable to the…

The membrane protein bacteriorhodopsin is a proton pump, in which proton transport is initiated by the light-induced isomerization of the chromophore…

A new experimental approach provides the long-awaited tools to understand the role of electrons in the molecular chiral reactivity and offers a way to…

The Meggers Award of OPTICA (formerly the Optical Society) was established in 1970 to honour the memory of William F. Meggers, an American physicist…

In recognition of her outstanding scientific work and its excellent presentation, Dr. Lisa-Marie Kern has been awarded the Dissertation Prize of the…

In a recent publication in Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07094-9, researchers at the Max Born Institute (MBI) in Berlin, Germany, and at…

The physicist establishes the Department of Precision Physics at the institute.

Professor Dr. Nathalie Picqué is establishing a new department as…

High-harmonic generation (HHG), a phenomenon awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for its realization in gases, has captivated researchers since its…

Materials that refuse to fit into theory are often the most fascinating. They challenge researchers to try harder to understand their peculiar…

A team of researchers from the Max Born Institute in Berlin has for the first time demonstrated attosecond-pump attosecond-probe spectroscopy (APAPS)…

An international team of researchers from the European XFEL together with colleagues from the Max Born Institute in Berlin, Universities of Berlin and…

The Royal Society of Chemistry has published the book "Structural Dynamics with X-ray and Electron Scattering" with a number of significant…

The ongoing war in Ukraine is severely hampering experimental research at their national facilities. It is therefore all the more important to help…

For her outstanding PhD thesis, Dr. Lisa-Marie Kern receives the 2023 Carl Ramsauer Award of the Berlin Physical Society. Each year, the Berlin…

An electron and the surrounding cloud of solvent dipoles couple through electric forces and can undergo joint collective motions. Such many-body…

The 2023 Physics Nobel Prize has been awarded to Anne L’Huillier, Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz “for experimental methods that generate attosecond…

We are delighted to announce that on June 26, 2023, Dr. Sangeeta Sharma has been installed as a professor at the FU Berlin, in a joint appointment…

Molecules in water and other polar media are subject to strong electric forces. Such forces originate from their liquid environment, which at ambient…

Atoms in a crystal form a regular lattice, in which they can move over small distances from their equilibrium positions. Such phonon excitations are…

The flow of matter, from macroscopic water currents to the microscopic flow of electric charge, underpins much of the infrastructure of modern times.…

Unlocking the secrets of magnetic materials requires the right illumination. Magnetic x-ray circular dichroism makes it possible to decode magnetic…

A team of scientists, led by researchers from the Max Born Institute in Berlin and Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin in Germany and from Brookhaven National…

The direct observation of the emergence of a new phase in a solid is the analog to the much-discussed molecular movie of a chemical reaction. Now, an…

Statement of the Max-Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short-Pulse Spectroscopy (MBI) on the report of "Deutsche Welle" from Nov 28th 2022 on…

Starting in January 2023, the research portfolio of the Max Born Institute will be complemented by a new Junior Research Group led by Dr. Daniel…

A new light source generates ultrashort infrared pulses at wavelengths around 12 µm with previously unattained peak intensity and stability. First…

The presence of ions affects the structure and dynamics of water on a multitude of length and time scales. New results from ultrafast spectroscopy and…

The observation of lasing in the forward direction in air upon focusing intense femtosecond light pulses has been a puzzling phenomenon since first…

Proton hydration, i.e. the involvement of a certain number of water molecules in solvating an excess proton, has been an intensively investigated…

Magnetic skyrmions are extremely small and stable swirls of magnetization, often referred to as ‘topological quasi-particles’ since an emerging…

Light-induced ionization of polar liquids such as alcohols generates free electrons. After generation, an electron localizes on an ultrafast time…

The future development of functional magnetic devices based on ultrafast optical manipulation of spins requires an understanding of the…

Ultrafast light-driven control of magnetization on the nanometer length scale is key to achieve competitive bit sizes in next generation data storage…

An international team of researchers from the Max Born Institute in Berlin, University College London and ELI-ALPS in Szeged, Hungary, has…

Unlike fictional laser swords, real laser beams do not interact with each other when they cross – unless the beams meet within a suitable material…

An ERC Advanced Grant has been awarded to Professor Dr. Olga Smirnova of the Max Born Institute and Technische Universität Berlin.

Phonons are quantum excitations which correspond to vibrations of the regular atomic array of a crystal. This crystal lattice consists of a large…

Magnetic bits for data storage can be written with ultrafast laser pulses, in contrast to the well-established path of using magnetic fields…

Photoacids are molecules that release a proton upon electronic excitation, thus enhancing the acidity of a liquid. Pioneering work by Theodor Förster…

Attosecond laser pulses in the extreme ultraviolet (XUV) are a unique tool enabling the observation and control of electron dynamics in atoms,…

Quantum mechanics is famous for the way that its predictions challenge intuitive human thinking developed through the way that we experience the…

A time-dependent electric current emits an electromagnetic wave, a basic physical effect exploited in telecom antennas. Transferring this mechanism to…

Lorenz Drescher has been awarded one of the 2021 Carl-Ramsauer Awards from the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft zu Berlin (PGzB) for his…

Materials consisting of a few atomic layers display properties determined by quantum physics. In a stack of such layers, vibrations of the atoms can…

The American Chemical Society (ACS) has awarded Thomas Elsaesser the Ahmed Zewail Award 2022. The prize is named after Ahmed Zewail, a pioneer of…

Antiferromagnets are magnetically ordered, but their magnetization exactly cancels out. That is why even their discoverer, Nobel laureate Louis Néel,…

All electronic devices around us, including the one you are using to read this, utilize the charge of an electron for storing and processing…

X-rays are a powerful tool for imaging objects. X-ray microscopes provide the ability to penetrate through matter and to resolve tiny features that…

An international team of researchers has demonstrated a new concept for the generation of intense extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) radiation by high-harmonic…

A research team of the Institute of Physics of the Humboldt University of Berlin together with cooperation partners Max Born Instituts (Berlin) and…

Smaller, faster, more energy-efficient: future requirements to computing and data storage are hard to fulfill and alternative concepts are…

Most people associate terahertz radiation from airport scanners. These radiations can, however, unleash a bag full of surprises when used to…

In a joint effort, researchers from the Humboldt-Universität (Berlin), the Max Born Institute (Berlin) and the University of Central Florida (USA),…

Ionization of water molecules by light generates free electrons in liquid water. After generation, the so-called solvated electron is formed, a…

The European XFEL Young Scientist Award recognizes outstanding contributions of young researchers in the early stages of their career to research at…

Researchers from the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy (MBI) have developed a new method to modify the spectral…

Femtosecond hard X-ray pulses are an important tool for unraveling structure changes of condensed matter on atomic length and time scales. A novel…

Density functional theory (DFT) has had a tremendous impact on solid-state physics and is, due to its computational efficiency, at the heart of modern…

Jochen Mikosch receives a prestigious Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). In a highly competitive and thorough procedure it…

In cells transfer RNA (tRNA) translates genetic information from the encoding messenger RNA (mRNA) for protein synthesis. New results from ultrafast…

A team of scientists led by the Max Born Institute (MBI), Berlin, Germany, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA, has…

One key scientific driver for the development of intense x-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) has been the prospect to transfer the concepts of…

Free electron X-ray lasers deliver intense ultrashort pulses of x-rays, which can be used to image nanometer-scale objects in a single shot. When the…

One of the long-standing goals of research on the light-induced dynamics of molecules is to observe time-dependent changes in the structure of…

Water molecules undergo ultrafast dithering motions at room temperature and generate extremely strong electric fields in their environment. New…

Vibrations of atoms in a crystal of the semiconductor gallium arsenide (GaAs) are impulsively shifted to a higher frequency by an optically excited…

Power-scalable ultrafast laser sources in the midwave-infrared (MWIR) are a key element for basic research and applications in material processing and…

In physics, a very intuitive way of describing the evolution of a system proceeds via the specification of functions of the spatiotemporal…

Steering and monitoring the light-driven motion of electrons inside matter on the time-scale of a single optical cycle is a key challenge in ultrafast…

Researchers at the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy (MBI) have reached a new milestone in few-cycle pulse…

In its statement, the Leibniz Association's Senate acknowledges MBI's outstanding research achievements and strong international position. The Senate…

Combining experiment and theory, researchers from the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy (MBI) and the Max Planck…

Dr. Arnaud Rouzée has been awarded the 2020 “JCP Editor’s Choice Award”  that rewards the most outstanding paper published in the Journal of Chemical…

Felix Willems received the Ernst-Eckhard-Koch Award 2019 for his PhD thesis on ultrafast magnetization dynamics.

A team led by researchers from the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy (MBI), Laser-Laboratorium Göttingen (LLG) and…

Light is the fastest way to distinguish right- and left-handed chiral molecules, which has important applications in chemistry and biology. However,…

A collaborative ultrafast spectroscopy and ab initio molecular dynamics simulations study, as recently published by scientists of the Max Born…

Topological insulators are quantum materials, which, due to their exotic electronic structure, on surfaces and edges conduct electric current like…

OISTR, the fastest mechanism for coherent control of spins with light in multi-sublattice systems, could now be tested experimentally by  manipulating…

Probing magnetic materials with extreme ultraviolet radiation allows to obtain a detailed microscopic picture of how magnetic systems interact with…

When exposed to intense laser pulses, the magnetization of a material can be manipulated very fast. Fundamentally, magnetization is connected to the…

For the second time, an ERC Advanced Grant has been awarded to Prof. Thomas Elsaesser of the Max Born Institute and Humboldt University in Berlin.

In analogy to the amplification of light in a laser, vibrations of a semiconductor crystal, so called phonons, were enhanced by interaction with an…

Aspirin is not only an important drug but also an interesting physics model system in which molecular vibrations and electrons are coupled in a…

When molecules interact with the oscillating field of a laser, an instantaneous, time-dependent dipole is induced. This very general effect underlies…

Pairs of negatively charged phosphate groups and positive magnesium ions represent a key structural feature of DNA and RNA embedded in water.…

The absorption of light in semiconductor crystals without inversion symmetry can generate electric currents. Researchers at the Max-Born-Institute…

X-ray spectroscopy provides direct access into the nature of chemical bonds, from which the outcome of chemical reactions can be understood. For this,…

Dejan Milošević, professor at the Faculty of Science of the University of Sarajevo and member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and…

Scientists from the Max Born Institute (MBI) have developed the first refractive lens that focuses extreme ultraviolet beams. Instead of using a glass…

In an award ceremony held at the Berlin town hall ("Rotes Rathaus") on Wednesday November 7th, Dr. Daniela Rupp, the leader of the Junior Research…