Research News

An international research team, led by Akitoshi Shiotari of the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society (FHI, Germany), Mariana Rossi of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD, Germany) and Takashi Kumagai of the Institute for Molecular Science/SOKENDAI (IMS, Japan) has successfully achieved the single-molecule spectroscopic observation of hydrogen (H₂) and deuterium (D₂) confined within a picocavity. The picocavity was formed between a silver nanotip and a silver single-crystal substrate under cryogenic and ultrahigh vacuum conditions, using tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (TERS). more

Scientists uncover how electrons self-organize into crystalline patterns—and melt—inside atomically twisted 2D materials. more

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) have developed an innovative method to study ultrafast magnetism in materials. They have shown the generation and application of magnetic field steps, in which a magnetic field is turned on in a matter of picoseconds. more

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) in collaboration with DTU Electro, the University of Sheffield and the University of Copenhagen, have proposed a novel method for efficiently generating single photons in the mid-infrared (MIR) range. This theoretical breakthrough, published in Science Advances, has the potential to revolutionize quantum technologies by enabling new applications in molecular sensing, precision metrology, and quantum communication. more

A collaborative team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD), Nanjing University, Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory (SLAB), and international partners has introduced a new method to regulate exotic electronic states in two-dimensional materials. more

Chirality is a fundamental property of matter that determines many biological, chemical and physical phenomena. Chiral solids, for example, offer exciting opportunities for catalysis, sensing and optical devices by enabling unique interactions with chiral molecules and polarized light. These properties are however established when the material is grown, that is, the left- and right-handed enantiomers cannot be converted into one another without melting and recrystallization. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) and the University of Oxford have shown that terahertz light can induce chirality in a non-chiral crystal, allowing either left- or right-handed enantiomers to emerge on demand. The finding, reported in Science, opens up exciting possibilities for exploring novel non-equilibrium phenomena in complex materials. more

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) and MIT have successfully created a new, long-lasting magnetic state in an antiferromagnetic material using only light. This breakthrough holds significant promise for advancing information processing and memory chip technology. The team reports the direct stimulation of atoms in an antiferromagnetic material with a terahertz laser—a light source oscillating more than a trillion times per second. By tuning the laser’s frequency to match the natural vibrations of the material’s atoms, they induced an ultrafast change in the atomic structure, ultimately driving the system into a novel magnetic state. Their work has been published in Nature. more

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter have made a groundbreaking advancement in light-controlled superconductivity, demonstrating that superconducting properties can be enhanced by coupling materials with quantum light in optical cavities. This study uses magnesium diboride (MgB₂), a well-known phonon-mediated superconductor, and employs state-of-the-art quantum electrodynamical density-functional theory (QEDFT) to reveal how photon vacuum fluctuations inside an optical cavity can increase its superconducting transition temperature. more

Researchers at the MPSD and Brookhaven National Laboratory used two-dimensional terahertz spectroscopy (2DTS) in a non-collinear geometry for the first time to isolate specific terahertz nonlinearities in the cuprate superconductor La_1.83Sr_0.17CuO₄ by their emission direction. Their work has been published in Nature Physics. more

The multiferroic NiI₂ has greater magnetoelectric coupling than any known material of its kind, making it a prime candidate for technology advances, an international research team reports in Nature.  more