Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik

A subtle shift in growth chemistry, richer in tin or richer in selenium, can be the difference between a scattered island film and a smooth, continuous one. This highlight explores how new work combining MBE growth, atomic-scale simulations, and machine learning traces this sensitivity down to how tin and selenium behave differently on the growing surface, and closes the loop from growth conditions to atomic mechanism to observed structure and back again.

PDI is pleased to announce its second successful award under the NSF–DFG Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) program. The newly funded project, "AI-Driven Platform for 2D Materials Synthesis and Discovery," is co-led at PDI by Assoc. Prof. Nadire Nayir, Head of PDI's Computational Materials Science Group (COMMAT). The project marks an important milestone in PDI's strategic expansion into AI-enabled and data-driven materials research.

Weaver Emma Wood joins PDI as 2026 Artist-in-Residence. In this interview, she talks about twenty years inside the "strict planning" of her craft, why she's excited to be the elephant in the room at a physics institute, and what a conversation between a weaver and a physicist might sound like.

PDI is pleased to announce that João Marcelo Lopes has been invited to join the DFG Cluster of Excellence "Center for Chiral Electronics" (CCE) as an associate partner. This invitation is a direct reflection of Lopes's standing in the field, and opens a valuable new channel connecting PDI's epitaxy and materials expertise with the Cluster's work on chirality-driven device concepts.