Author Archives: DIPC
The flexibility of 2D silica
Since the discovery that graphene, the two dimensional carbon allotrope, can be isolated and incorporated into electronic devices intense research efforts have been triggered. Driving forces usually mentioned behind the experimental and theoretical studies of graphene are the exceptional electronic […]
How to extract the interacting spectral function from a ground state DFT calculation
The electronic wave function of an n-electron molecule depends on 3n spatial and n spin coordinates. In a sense, the wave function of a many-electron molecule contains more information than is needed and is lacking in direct physical significance. This […]
Higher-order topological insulators
Topological insulators are materials with special universal properties, which are protected against perturbations. Such properties are theoretically described by topology, a branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of geometrical objects that are unchanged by continuous deformations. Concretely, topological insulators […]
The forgotten fraction in semicrystalline semiconducting polymers
A class of materials of utmost fundamental and applied interest is that of semicrystalline polymers. Actually, all solid synthetic polymers are, in general, partly crystalline and partly amorphous. The degree of crystallinity depends on the polymer structure and on how […]
Temperature dependence of rare earth valence has nothing to do with Kondo temperature
The scattering of conduction electrons in metals owing to impurities with magnetic moments is known as the Kondo effect, after Jun Kondo, who analysed the phenomenon in 1964. This scattering increases the electrical resistance and has the consequence that, in […]
Bioorthogonal catalytic activation of anticancer metal complexes
Metal complexes are typically regarded as catalysts that convert organic substrates into more valuable compounds; however, to date, catalytic transformations of metal complexes are practically unknown and represent a complete new way of thinking in catalysis. Their development can expand […]
The multiscale nature of picocavities: a classical view to a quantum effect
Progress in nanotechnology has allowed controlling the morphology of metallic nanoparticles at the nanometer and even subnanometer scale, triggering the development of various applications in plasmonics and nanooptics, such as in enhanced vibrational spectroscopy, improvement of energy absorption of solar […]
Metals, greek letters and Earth’s core
Imagine a bucket filled with hard spheres. As these spheres are free to pack together as closely as geometry allows they tend to adopt a close-packed structure, a structure in which there is least unfilled space. X-ray diffraction studies […]
The 7 states of condensed matter at room temperature
In ‘Chemistry Essentials for Dummies‘, John T. Moore writes:
Matter is anything that has mass and occupies space. It can exist in one of three classic states: solid, liquid, and gas. When a substance goes from one […]
What bounds a molecular solid together?
We usually think of crystals as composed of different atoms in certain proportions, this proportion being the molecular fórmula that represents the crystal. However, it is not surprising that any molecule could be the basis of a crystal structure, whether […]