Neurotransmitters are released through the fusion of synaptic vesicles, which contain large amounts of neurotransmitters. Scientists around JARA-BRAIN and JARA-SOFT member Prof. Christoph Fahlke have shown, how synaptic vesicles accumulate the neurotransmitter glutamate and developed a mathematical model of the synaptic vesicle that describes these processes. The results have now been published in the renowned journal Nature Communications.
Since four decades the cooperation Umbrella between the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology and the two German institutions Forschungszentrum Jülich and RWTH Aachen exists. This makes it one of the oldest research collaborations. This year, the partners celebrated the anniversary and this year's Umbrella Awardees at the 36th Umbrella Symposium at the end of May.
The Summer School, which alternates between Germany and the USA, was held in Germany this year. On 25.5, the focus was on the Jülich Research Center, which included visits to the Supercomputing Center and Prof. Kathrin Amunts' neuroanatomy labs, as well as keynote lectures by JARA-BRAIN members Prof. Thomas Frodl and Prof. Jon Shah.
Together, the two JARA partners Forschungszentrum Jülich and RWTH Aachen University, in cooperation with Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, are making a vision come true. A unique infrastructure for the characterization of materials is to be created in the "Ernst Ruska-Centrum 2.0" in the middle of the Rhenish mining area with the help of next-generation electron microscopes. In the presence of State Secretary Judith Pirscher from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and Ina Brandes, Minister for Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, the roofing ceremony for the new building was celebrated as a milestone on the way to this research infrastructure.
Under the umbrella of JARA Researchers at RWTH Aachen University and Forschungszentrum Jülich have uncovered important characteristics of double quantum dots in bilayer graphene, an increasingly promising material for possible applications in quantum technologies. The team has demonstrated near-perfect particle-hole symmetry in graphene quantum dots, which could lead to more efficient quantum information processing. The study has been published in Nature.