Sodium-ion batteries: How doping works

Three years of experiments at BESSY II, PETRA III, and SOLARIS

23-Feb-2024 - Sodium-ion batteries still have a number of weaknesses that could be remedied by optimising the battery materials. One possibility is to dope the cathode material with foreign elements. A team from HZB and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin has now investigated the effects of doping with Scandium and ...

Molecular orbitals determine stability

The results could also help industry to optimise the stability of coordination polymers

14-Feb-2024 - Carboxylic acid dianions (fumarate, maleate and succinate) play a role in coordination chemistry and to some extent also in the biochemistry of body cells. An HZB team at BESSY II has now analysed their electronic structures using RIXS in combination with DFT simulations. The results provide ...

High entropy alloys: structural disorder and magnetic properties

"High-entropy alloys are an extremely diverse and exciting class of materials”

26-Oct-2022 - High-entropy alloys (HEAs) are promising materials for catalysis and energy storage, and at the same time they are extremely hard, heat resistant and demonstrate great variability in their magnetic behaviour. Now, a team at BESSY II in collaboration with Ruhr University Bochum, BAM, Freie ...

Green hydrogen: faster progress with modern X-ray sources

11-Oct-2022 - In order to produce green hydrogen, water can be split up via electrocatalysis, powered by renewable sources such as sun or wind. A review article in the journal Angewandte Chemie Int. Ed. shows how modern X-ray sources such as BESSY II can advance the development of suitable electrocatalysts. In ...

Atomic displacements in High-Entropy Alloys examined

High-entropy alloys are under discussion for very different applications

30-Jun-2022 - High-entropy alloys of 3d metals have intriguing properties that are interesting for applications in the energy sector. An international team at BESSY II has now investigated the local order on an atomic scale in a so-called high-entropy Cantor alloy of chromium, manganese, iron, cobalt and ...

Calculating the "fingerprints" of molecules with artificial intelligence

16-Jun-2022 - With conventional methods, it is extremely time-consuming to calculate the spectral fingerprint of larger molecules. But this is a prerequisite for correctly interpreting experimentally obtained data. Now, a team at HZB has achieved very good results in significantly less time using self-learning ...

Charge transfer within transition-metal dyes analysed

11-Jul-2019 - Transition-metal complexes in dye-based solar cells are responsible for converting light into electrical energy. A model of spatial charge separation within the molecule has been used to describe this conversion. However, an analysis at BESSY II shows that this description of the process is too ...

Nanodiamonds as photocatalysts

22-Oct-2018 - Diamond nanomaterials are considered hot candidates for low-cost photocatalysts. They can be activated by light and can then accelerate certain reactions between water and CO2 and produce carbon-neutral "solar fuels". The EU project DIACAT has now doped such diamond materials with boron and shown ...

An alternative to platinum: Iron-nitrogen compounds as catalysts in graphene

29-Jan-2016 - Fuel cells convert the chemical energy stored in hydrogen (H2) into electrical energy by electrochemically "combusting" hydrogen gas with oxygen (O2) from the air into water (H2O), thereby generating electricity. As a result, future electric automobiles might be operated quite well with fuel ...

Scientists get first glimpse of a chemical bond being born

A fundamental advance has big implications for making chemistry more efficient

16-Feb-2015 - Scientists have used an X-ray laser at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to get the first glimpse of the transition state where two atoms begin to form a weak bond on the way to becoming a molecule. This fundamental advance, reported Feb. 12 in Science Express and ...