Fascinating research,or what are they actually doing there?

PSI-Forscher haben gezeigt, wie sich schnellere und genauere Quantenbits erschaffen liessen. Die zentralen Elemente sind dabei magnetische Atome aus der Klasse der sogenannten Seltenen Erden, die gezielt in das Kristallgitter eines Materials eingebracht würden.

At the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, researchers together with a company have constructed a room that is one of the best magnetically shielded places on the earth. With its help, they want to solve the last mysteries of matter and answer a fundamental question: Why does matter - and thus why do we - exist at all?

The art of engineering means, first of all, the skill required to design and manufacture devices that enable top technical performance. This gallery shows, in five pictures, that this term can also be understood differently if the devices are regarded as works of art with their very own aesthetic, apart from their actual function.

Green light for SLS 2.0: The planned upgrade of the Swiss Light Source SLS can proceed; the funding is provided for within the framework of the ERI Dispatch for 2021-2024, which has been approved.

Operando X-ray spectrotomography allows scientists to look inside of functioning chemical reactors. A research team at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), at Paul Scherrer Institute PSI and at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in France have employed this method successfully.

On the way to a sustainable energy system, technologies that help to flexibly convert and efficiently store energy are becoming increasingly important. ReMaP, a novel research platform, aims to investigate these urgent issues under realistic conditions.

It is necessary to prepare now for the planned upgrade of the Swiss Light Source SLS. In order to do justice to future research, Alun Ashton is estimating the amount of data that future experiments will produce.

At the X-ray free-electron laser SwissFEL of the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, the second beamline is currently being put into operation. With Athos, researchers want to understand how catalysts work or how biomolecules cause hereditary diseases.

Measurements at the Swiss Light Source SLS have helped to understand how the only known natural protein-mineral crystal is formed. It is part of the fascinating glass skeleton of sponges.

In view of the coronavirus pandemic, the Paul Scherrer Institute changed to the extraordinary situation in spring 2020. By then, only a maximum of 20 percent of all PSI employees work at PSI. Five pictures show how research and operations at PSI nevertheless continued.

The composition of particulate matter can influence its harmfulness to human health just as much as the amount, PSI researchers show in a newly published study. Experiments and computational modelling showed that in Europe high concentrations of particulate matter harmful to human health occur mainly in metropolitan areas.

The European Research Council (ERC) is funding an interdisciplinary collaborative project with 10 million euros for the structural and biophysical analysis of selected photoreceptors and their development into "OptoGPCRs", light-controlled molecular switches with a wide range of applications in biology and medicine.

PSI researchers have set up camp at a biogas plant near Lucerne. Between meadows and gigantic fermenters, they are investigating how they can remove impurities from the biogas to make this energy source even more usable.

For the construction of the SwissFEL facility in 2013, around five hectares of forest were cleared and transformed into a new habitat for flora and fauna. Biologists and forest engineers have now assessed the results of the renaturization project and are excited about the progress to date.

At PSI, researchers decipher the structure of the proteins in bacteria and viruses. This knowledge can aid, for example, in the development of drugs against infectious diseases. But before the investigation can begin, an extremely tricky problem has to be solved: the crystallisation of the molecules.