The BioRef neutron instrument to be set up again at ANSTO in Australia
BioRef was transported from HZB on December 19, 2016 and shipped to Australia. The trip will take about two months. © D. Höcker/HZB
The BioRef neutron instrument commenced its roughly two-month journey from HZB to Australia on December 19, 2016. It will be set up again at the OPAL neutron source there, part of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) in Sydney. It is expected to be available to the international scientific community beginning in 2018 under the name "Spatz".
ANSTO operates the OPAL neutron source as part of the Centre for Neutron Scattering in the Lucas Heights quarter of Sydney. OPAL is one of the newest and most successful neutron sources in the world and ANSTO is planning further expansion of the neutron source and neutron research.
There has been close cooperation with the HZB for several years, in particular in research on energy materials. The two institutions entered into a new agreement in October 2016 to intensify this cooperation. Among other aspects, they will strive for an active exchange of ANSTO and HZB scientists, and they intend to cooperate more closely in the area of support for junior scientists as well. ANSTO is taking over the BioRef reflectometer, which facilitates research on soft matter, solid/liquid interfaces, and thin films, from the BER II neutron source in Berlin that will close at the end of 2019.
BioRef was packed up in December and shipped to Australia. It will be set up anew at ANSTO and commissioned in 2017. It will then become available for research again beginning in 2018 under the name “Spatz”, a reference to its German origins. Instrument time will be explicitly reserved there for the German user group.
In order to ensure the transfer of knowledge to the neutron community and the continued use of neutron instruments, HZB is also working on cooperative agreements with other research institutions in Europe and the world.
- Disorder creates new properties in compound semiconductorsAn international research team has demonstrated that the intrinsic disorder of the compound semiconductor CuInSnS₄ can be exploited to influence its optical properties. While the atomic vibrations also sense the local disorder, their response is averaged over many different local environments and therefore appear isotropic, as expected for a cubic crystal. In contrast, the optical excitations, known as excitons, are much more sensitive to the local arrangement of atoms. Surprisingly, they show a direction-dependent optical response even though the average crystal structure is cubic. These findings shed new light on the relationship between disorder and material properties, opening up new options for targeted 'disorder engineering' in optoelectronic and photocatalytic devices.
- Superconducting TES array X-ray spectrometer goes into operation at BESSY IIEurope's first and only TES-spectrometer at a synchrotron source is now in operation at BESSY II, developed within a collaboration between the HZB, the MPI-CEC (Mühlheim-an-der-Ruhr, Germany) and the NIST (Boulder CO, USA). The photon detection efficiency of the new instrument exceeds that of wavelength-dispersive X-ray emission spectrometers by a factor of 100 to 1000. It will be used to investigate the electronic properties of atomically thin layers, nanostructures and highly diluted atomic and molecular samples. The team is looking forward to receiving exciting research proposals from the user community.
- A New Era in Catalysis: ASCEND Launch in Berlin, €30 Million in FundingOn 11 June 2026, the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) in Adlershof hosted the launch of ASCEND (Accelerated Solutions for Catalysis using Emerging Nanotechnology and Digital Innovation). The event took place in the presence of the Minister of Research, Dorothee Bär, President of the Helmholtz Association, Prof. Dr. Martin Keller, and President of the Max Planck Society, Prof. Dr. Patrick Cramer. Bringing together leading partners from industry and research, ASCEND is supported by BMFTR with €30 million in funding and officially started on 1 April 2026. The initiative aims to accelerate the discovery of next-generation catalysts and enable more sustainable chemical processes.