Success story: Twinning Programme at HZDR

The project NEPHEWS supports the exchange of knowledge through internships of twinning users at European user facilities.

In November 2025, PhD student Iuliia Neumann completed her research stay at the ELBE Center for High-Power Radiation Sources at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf in Germany.

Iuliia comes from the University of Stuttgart. Her background is in situ X-ray electrochemistry of tungsten bronzes.

At the ELBE facility, Iuliia’s visit overlapped with a user experiment that involved high-field high-repetition-rate terahertz (THz) radiation.

“During my stay at the ELBE/TELBE facility (HZDR, Dresden) I had the opportunity to visit the TELBE lab facility, where I received a detailed explanation of the setup involving THz and laser optics. It was fascinating to observe the nonlinear responses generated by the user samples and to work together with the team”.

The training helped Iuliia

• Develop the manual skills for working with sensitive samples in complex environments (applied magnetic fields + low temperatures + THz radiation)
• Learn a new experimental technique
• Improve her proposal writing skills
• Foster new collaborations with an international scientific community
• Gain hands-on understanding of accelerator-based THz generation, radiation protection, and nonlinear spectroscopy techniques.

Iuliia concluded her stay with an optimistic note for the future:

“I’m on my way to becoming an independent researcher, and this training was an important milestone. I’m grateful for the opportunity to delve into the working process of beamline scientists. This knowledge will help me both as a potential user and in understanding the principles of a beamline postdoctoral position.”

The NEPHEWS Project is committed to supporting the next generation of researchers with access to state-of-the-art user facilities across Europe.

Author: HZDR Team