Arsenic contamination in drinking water poses a critical global public health hazard. Prolonged exposure to inorganic arsenic—predominantly present in groundwater as arsenate, where arsenic exists in its +5 oxidation state—can lead to severe dermatological lesions, cardiovascular diseases, and cancers. To mitigate these health risks, the World Health Organization has established a strict provisional safety guideline […]
One of the most striking discoveries in condensed matter physics over the past few years is that simply rotating one atomically thin crystal on top of an identical layer can create entirely new electronic behavior. This idea became famous in 2018, when physicists found that graphene sheets stacked at a very particular “magic angle” could […]
DIPC Computational and Theoretical Chemistry • DIPC Photochemistry
Turning low-energy light into higher-energy light seems to break the usual rules of physics, since energy is supposed to run downhill, not uphill. Yet a process called photon upconversion achieves exactly this, without breaking any laws of thermodynamics. Instead of absorbing one photon and releasing a single photon of lower energy, as most light-absorbing molecules […]
Building electronic devices often requires stacking different crystalline materials on top of one another with atomic precision. This process, called heteroepitaxy, works best when the two crystals share similar atomic patterns. When their symmetries differ, the upper crystal tends to grow in several orientations at once instead of a single one, creating defects that degrade […]
Biochemistry • Chemical engineering • Chemistry • DIPC Biochemistry • Food processing
Enzymes and other biomolecules are often anchored onto solid materials so they can be reused, purified more easily, and made more stable, a strategy biotechnology has relied on since industrial-scale immobilized enzymes first appeared in chemical manufacturing in the mid-twentieth century. Immobilized enzymes today drive processes from food and pharmaceutical production to biosensors and medical […]
One of the great unanswered questions in physics concerns the nature of neutrinos, the lightest known particles with mass. A process called neutrinoless double beta decay could provide the answer. In ordinary double beta decay, two neutrons inside a nucleus transform into two protons, emitting two electrons and two antineutrinos. In the neutrinoless version, only […]
When astronomers in the eighteenth century first turned powerful telescopes toward the Milky Way, they noticed something puzzling: tight, spherical swarms of stars scattered across the sky. Now we know that each contains hundreds of thousands of suns packed into a region just a few dozen light-years across. These objects, known today as globular clusters […]
Chemistry • DIPC Computational and Theoretical Chemistry • Quantum chemistry
Ever since the birth of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century, chemists have struggled with a fundamental paradox. On one hand, Lewis dot structures and molecular drawings teach us to think of electrons as localized entities—either sitting neatly in lone pairs or shared directly between two bonding atoms. On the other hand, Schrödinger’s wave […]
Chemistry • DIPC Computational and Theoretical Chemistry • Quantum chemistry
Chemical bonds are among the most familiar ideas in science. They explain why hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water, why carbon atoms build long chains in organic molecules, and why every substance has the shape and properties it does. Yet, despite their central role in chemistry, bonds are not directly observable objects. They are […]
Over a century ago, quantum physics revealed a surprising fact: truly identical particles do not behave like tiny billiard balls. When two indistinguishable particles meet under the right conditions, they can interfere with each other in ways that have no classical explanation. One of the most famous demonstrations of this phenomenon is the Hong–Ou–Mandel effect […]