Professor Marco Durante, Head of the Biophysics Department at GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung and Professor at the Department of Physics at TU Darmstadt, Institute of Condensed Matter Physics, has been granted a prestigious European Union research funding award for established scientists: The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded him the renowned Advanced Grant. The biophysicist will be able to use the millions in funding to realize an ambitious research project to improve tumor therapy. As lead scientist and together with his team he will conduct research into even more effective treatments for cancer and investigate a promising radiotherapy method that uses ultra-short pulses of heavy ion beams with ultra-high dose rates.

For the second time, Würzburg chemistry professor Frank Würthner has received a prestigious award from the European Research Council: the ERC Advanced Grant is endowed with 2.5 million euros. The professor is pursuing an ambitious goal: he wants to synthesise schwarzites, novel carbon-based nanomaterials with unique properties.

For the first time, a research team led by Markus Koch from the Institute of Experimental Physics at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) has tracked in real time how individual atoms combine to form a cluster and which processes are involved. To achieve this, the researchers first isolated magnesium atoms using superfluid helium and then used a laser pulse to trigger the formation process. The researchers were able to observe this cluster formation and the involved energy transfer between individual atoms with a temporal resolution in the femtosecond range (1 femtosecond = 1 quadrillionth of a second). They recently published their findings in the journal Communications Chemistry.

Optical computing confronts three fundamental bottlenecks: clock-rate constraints, chip-scale limits, and inter-core parallelism. While clock rates and chip scales approach technological limits, microcomb-driven parallel optical computing offers a viable path to boost computility by overcoming parallelism constraints. A team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed a parallel optical computing architecture with 100 wavelengths, pushing the boundary of computility. This breakthrough enables higher computing density and scalable, thread-level parallelism beyond conventional hardware limitations.