Research

Visitors to the Oktoberfest have always known it and now it has been scientifically proven – beer can lift your spirits. Scientists at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) examined 13,000 food components to find out whether they stimulate the reward centre in the brain and make pe...

Catalysts are agents that initiate chemical reactions, speed them up or significantly increase the yield of the desired product. New and improved catalysts are thus considered the key to creating more sustainable and efficient production processes in the chemical industry. In a joint research projec...

Researchers at FAU and the Max Planck Institute (MPI) in Halle have managed to find the answer to one of the riddles of solid-state physics. The results of their work recently appeared in the prominent journal Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-00397-8). One of the fundamental phenome...

Physicists from FAU and Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY, Hamburg) have come up with a method that could significantly improve the quality of X-ray images in comparison to conventional methods. Incoherent diffractive imaging (IDI) could help to image individual atoms in nanocrystals or molecul...

In the middle of the large Chilean Atacama desert, a team of Polish astronomers are patiently monitoring millions of celestial bodies night after night with the help of a modern robotic telescope. In 2013, the team was surprised when they discovered, in the course of their survey, stars that pulsate...

In the world of research, diffusion is understood as a process in which tiny particles uniformly disperse throughout a gas or liquid. Although these media are made up of individual particles, diffusion is perceived as a continuous process. To date, the effects of an individual collision between part...

Pressed into cubes, in the form of small crystals, in fizzy drinks, chocolate bars or in our coffee – we use sugar in vast quantities to sweeten drinks and foodstuffs. In Germany our sugar comes from sugar beet. Now researchers from the FAU, together with colleagues from other universities and from ...

The role of the physical factors which govern cell-cell adhesion and its stability should not be underestimated. This is the conclusion reached by a team of researchers led by Prof. Dr. Ana‐Sunčana Smith of the PULS Group and Professor of Theoretical Physics at FAU and their German and French collab...

Physicists at FAU and Friedrich Schiller University Jena (FSU) have accomplished a quantum leap in light research. They have managed to capture the behaviour of extremely short laser pulses during focusing by means of very high spatial and temporal resolution. The results are of fundamental relevanc...

In view of climate change and the needs of the energy reform, it has become particularly important to significantly increase the efficiency of organic solar cells. In a process known as ‘singlet fission’, one photon simultaneously excites two electrons. If this effect can be exploited, it may well b...