Mechanism of Cobalt-Manganese Catalysts Deciphered

Combination of different methods was the key to success

22-Oct-2024 - The energy carrier hydrogen can be obtained from water by electrolysis. This works particularly well with Cobalt spinel electrocatalysts containing manganese. However, it was unclear why. Conventional catalysts for hydrogen production via water electrolysis usually contain precious metals and are ...

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 ...

Electron bubbles modelled from X-ray laser data

An international team of scientists uncovers a groundbreaking model for the effects of radiation in water systems

06-Feb-2024 - What happens when radiation hits water? This is a question that has an impact every time you get an X-ray at the doctor’s office, given you are mostly made of water. A team of theoretical physicists at DESY has worked on data taken by colleagues from Argonne National Laboratory in the US at the ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...