Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik

PDI's Alexander Kuznetsov is at the heart of a new c't Magazin deep-dive into one of quantum physics' most intriguing frontiers: time crystals. This exotic state of matter pulses in a regular rhythm, repeating not in space, but in time, and what was once dismissed as physical nonsense is now a reality in labs around the world. The article traces their journey from theoretical idea to experimental breakthrough, and asks what role they might one day play in precision sensing, data storage, and quantum computing.

With the involvement of scientists from the Paul Drude Institute for Solid State Electronics in Berlin and the Universities of Augsburg and Münster, international researchers have presented a new roadmap for surface acoustic waves. The publication outlines how this technology will evolve over the next ten years, spanning applications from signal processing to quantum technologies and the life sciences. The roadmap is regarded as an important guide for research and practical applications.

Congratulations to PDI scientist Hua Lv, whose poster "Transport Properties in All-Epitaxial Fe₅₋ₓGeTe₂/WSe₂ Van der Waals Heterostructures" was awarded Best Poster Presentation at IEEE INTERMAG 2026.

Threading dislocations are among the most stubborn obstacles to integrating III-V semiconductors on silicon. Filter layers help, but a long-standing puzzle has been why thermal annealing reshapes their internal defect network without actually reducing dislocation density. In this scientific highlight, we present work by researchers at PDI and IES Montpellier who filmed individual dislocations in real time inside an electron microscope and identified the growth conditions under which filtering works best.