For strong non-university research in Berlin
With greater impact: As an association, BR50 can promote networking in the Berlin research area even more strongly.
The non-university research institutions in Berlin will work even more closely together in the future. Their association Berlin Research 50 (BR50), founded in 2020, has joined forces to form a registered non-profit association on 4. October 2022. Together, the research institutions want to further develop and strengthen Berlin as a science location.
Representatives of the institutions gathered at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) for the official founding of the association. A five-member board was also elected. Following the founding, the association now comprises 27 research and science institutions, including Leibniz and Max Planck Institutes, Helmholtz Centres and federal departmental research institutions. Other non-university institutions in Berlin are associated with the association as partners in the network.
As an association, BR50 will support its member institutions even more in networking with each other and with other scientific actors in Berlin and represent the interests of non-university institutions.
You can find more information on the BR50 page.
BR 50 Podcast - lots of exciting research
Many societal challenges, such as climate change, are far too complex for one scientific discipline to solve alone. But together they are making progress. The BR 50 podcast gives an insight into how versatile the research of "non-university" scientists is. In two podcast episodes, listen to how the Helmholtz Centre Berlin is advancing the energy transformation in society with its research. Here you get to the podcast (in German).
- Ultrafast demagnetisation - Thinner iron, stronger effectThe thinner an iron film, the more easily it can be demagnetised by a laser pulse. Researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen, working with Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and other partners, have discovered why: the key lies in the magnetic order at the material's interfaces. In the long term, these findings could contribute to the development of new technologies for magnetic data storage. The results have been published in the scientific journal Advanced Science.
- Blind spot for the arrangement of atomsArtificial intelligence is increasingly being used to predict the properties of new materials. A research team from Jena and the United States now shows in a study published in the journal Nature Computational Science that when language models are used for this purpose, they reliably identify which types of atoms a material contains. However, they make insufficient use of information about how those atoms are arranged in space. Neither larger models nor additional training data resolve this weakness. For material properties that depend strongly on structure, AI models specifically designed to process spatial relationships are therefore the more reliable choice. (DOI: 10.1038/s43588-026-01045-2)
- Patterns of polar vortices in lead-free superlattices on siliconA team at HZB has, for the first time, reported polar vortices in (BaTiO3/SrTiO3)10 superlattices on silicon. These results expand the range of materials and substrates on which polar topological textures can occur and open up new options for incorporating complex ferroelectric states into silicon-based technologies.