Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids

The creation of three-dimensional superconducting nanostructures enables local control of the superconducting state

Claire Donnelly and Eugene Kim will receive the 2024 Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize of the German Research Foundation

On September 4, 2023, Minister-President Michael Kretschmer and Max Planck President Patrick Cramer hosted a ceremonial event at the Kulturpalast in Dresden commemorating the 30-year success story of the Max Planck Society in Leipzig and Dresden. 

The new team of Vice-Presidents includes three women. This means women now hold the majority on the Executive Committee

Hydrogen is supposed to help many areas of the economy become independent from fossil fuels. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden are using the quantum properties of catalysts to make the electrolysis required for producing hydrogen more efficient.

It is frequently only the development of new materials that makes technological advances possible, whether in the areas of energy supply or information technology. With the Heusler compounds, Claudia Felser, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden, uncovered a rich source of materials that offer promising properties for a variety of applications.

Superconductivity – a material’s ability to perfectly transmit electric current and expel magnetic fields – offers both revolutionary technological capabilities as well as a fascinating puzzle for our fundamental understanding of materials physics. The recent realization of a decades-old prediction for nickel-based superconductors may provide important clues for understanding how superconductivity can be stabilized at relatively high temperatures, where it may be most technologically useful. Our group combines interdisciplinary experimental approaches in a global collaborative network to investigate fundamental properties of nickelate superconductors, which can in turn help us uncover new promising compounds.

By combining novel materials into electromagnetic quantum circuits, the circuit can be used as a sensitive probe of the material structure, and strong quantum effects in the material can be used to make a new class of devices for quantum technology.

Combining nanoscale 3D printing, and magnetic microscopy, researchers have created DNA-like magnetic nanostructures. Nanoscale textures form both in the material and the magnetic field, opening opportunities for computing applications – and beyond. 

Using a recently developed formalism, titled topological quantum chemistry (TQC) and magnetic TQC, we carry out a high-throughput search of topological materials in well known databases, such as Inorganic Crystal Structure Database. We identified as many as 20000 materials that display topological features and another ~100 new topological magnetic materials. Herein, we review this discovery and provide insights for future material search directions.

The Quantum Hall Effect (QHE) in two-dimensional (2D) metals is a macroscopic quantum phenomenon and has helped to solve many important aspects of quantum physics. In common three-dimensional (3D) metals, the QHE is usually forbidden, because the third dimension destroys the quantization. However, our studies on the 3D metals ZrTe ₅ and HfTe ₅ show that their Hall resistance can be quasi-quantized if there are enough electrons in the materials. This makes the Hall effect in ZrTe ₅ and HfTe ₅ a real 3D counterpart to QHE in 2D systems.