The Germany-based Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids announced Jan. 4 that it will set up a research center at the National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center in northern Taiwan’s Hsinchu City this year.
In a news conference at the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taipei City, the NSRRC said the research conducted at the new facility, called the Center for Complex Phase Materials, will focus on semiconductors, nano-structures and magnetic materials. The German institute and Republic of China (Taiwan) government will each provide 200,000 euros (US$210,504) per year to the center to support the work of graduate students, post-doctoral researchers and scientists.
The research organization based in Dresden, Germany, will also work to strengthen scientific collaboration and talent exchanges with the NSRRC as well as Hsinchu-based National Chiao Tung University and National Tsing Hua University.
According to the NSRRC, the latest initiative builds on the longstanding bilateral cooperation on synchrotron-based research between Taiwan and Germany. A synchrotron is a type of particle accelerator with a wide variety of scientific applications.
For more than 20 years, the team led by Liu Hao Tjeng, director of the German institute, has been using the NSRRC’s synchrotron light source to perform experiments and published more than 90 research papers with local scientists in leading academic journals.
Tjeng’s organization spent 1.5 million euros on a beamline station that began operating last year at the NSRRC’s NT$7 billion (US$217 million) Taiwan Photon Source, one of the brightest synchrotron X-ray sources in the world. Beamlines are the paths on which accelerated particles travel.
The German institute is operated by the Max Planck Society, one of the world’s most renowned research organizations. The society has been home to 18 Nobel Prize laureates in chemistry, physics and medicine since 1948.
Taiwan’s synchrotron became operational in October 1993, and the following year its beamlines were opened for service to researchers around the world in basic and applied fields spanning biology, chemistry, engineering, material sciences and physics. (SFC-E)
Write to Taiwan Today at ttonline@mofa.gov.tw