Credit: HZDR / Blaurock
Reliable and economical systems for storing large amounts of energy are needed for industrial nations such as Germany to succeed in making strides toward a regenerative energy supply. An international team led by Tom Weier and Norbert Weber from the Institute of Fluid Dynamics at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) aims to bring such applications to a level in which they are ready for use. The SOLSTICE project strives to develop energy storage systems based on liquid sodium and zinc from January 2021 onwards. The European Union is funding the project with eight million Euros through the Horizon 2020 program.
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IMAGE: Ultra-thin gold lamellae drastically amplify the incoming terahertz pulses (red) in the underlying graphene layer, enabling efficient frequency multiplication. view more
Credit: HZDR/Werkstatt X
On the electromagnetic spectrum, terahertz light is located between infrared radiation and microwaves. It holds enormous potential for tomorrow s technologies: Among other things, it might succeed 5G by enabling extremely fast mobile communications connections and wireless networks. The bottleneck in the transition from gigahertz to terahertz frequencies has been caused by insufficiently efficient sources and converters. A German-Spanish research team with the participation of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has now developed a material system to generate terahertz pulses much more effectively than before. It is based on graphene, i.e., a super-thin carbon sheet, coated with a metallic lamellar structure. The research group presented its results i