Yearbook 2016

The Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne has a long history of researching European integration and European monetary orders. The MPIfG’s research on Europe links the analysis of multilevel systems to insights from Comparative Political Economy into the inherent logic of the manufacturing and distributive regimes that are found in the EU and the eurozone. How can the euro crisis be judged on this basis and which possible solutions follow? more

The Web has become a vast repository of information and knowledge about a wide range of topics and real-world events. There are a growing number of sites, ranging from question answering sites and online communities to microblogs, where knowledge is crowdsourced and it also the crowd who curates the contributed knowledge.  These sites also contain an ever-growing number of unverified stories of questionable origin. There is a growing need for computational methods to understand, predict and enhance the creation, consumption and dissemination of trustworthy knowledge. more

Lifted by a huge helium-filled balloon, the solar observatory Sunrise has already carried out two sixday long flights along the Arctic Circle. While the first flight has provided new insights into the lower atmosphere of the Sun at low magnetic activity, some selected findings of the second flight, carried out at a significantly higher solar activity level, are presented here. more

Quantum chemical approaches to the description of the electronic structure of real materials can be used to predict even strong electronic correlation effects with high accuracy. However, the scaling of the computational complexity to calculate and store the true many-electron wave function often makes these methods intractable. In this review we report on recent progress to reduce the computational complexity of wave function based methods for the study of molecules and solids. more

In analogy to lithium-ion technology, bilayer graphene is employed as an electrode in an electrochemical cell for the first time. An innovative cell design allows for the application of electronic transport methods known from the field of nanostructures and low-dimensional systems. This unusual combination offers unprecedented direct access to the motion of lithium-ions that may be reversibly inserted in between the two carbon sheets of bilayer graphene. An ionic mobility much higher than in bulk graphite can thus be revealed. more

The properties of matter, e.g., the conductivity, can be tailored with light. This can be done with a lot of photons that are part of a laser beam, or in certain cases only a few photons are enough. In the theory department of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg, researchers use both extreme cases to investigate novel states of matter: a laser allows theoretically generating hitherto unobserved states of matter and via a few photons chemical reactions can be altered. more