Research

The largest particle accelerator in the world – the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland – has a circumference of around 26 kilometres. Researchers at Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Germany, are attempting to go to the other extreme by building the world’s smallest ...

Controlling electronic current is essential to modern electronics, as data and signals are transferred by streams of electrons which are controlled at high speed. Demands on transmission speeds are also increasing as technology develops. Scientists from the Chair of Laser Physics and the Chair of Ap...

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...

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...

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...