Author Archives: DIPC
Spin in a closed-shell organic molecule stabilized on a metallic surface
Every year the amount of data produced is of the order of magnitude of the Avogadro’s constant, thus 6.028×1023. This trend is supposed to increase even more in the next future. This implies that more and more special […]
The ultrafast dynamics of adsorbates deciphered
One of the ultimate goals in surface science is to comprehend the fundamental processes that make that surface reactions need less than a picosecond (10-12 s) to occur. This means understanding what is happening at the scale of […]
27% of all materials in nature are topological. And now there is a catalogue
Topological materials have 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. Topological materials behave like an […]
The unexpected role of glycolaldehyde in photocatalytic cofactor regeneration using triethanolamine
Nature is a source of inspiration for scientists. If the efficiency of natural processes efficiency has been honed by billions of years of evolution, it seems reasonable that the best way to achieve some process is to try and mimic […]
Bionanospear, a living nanoprobe with subwavelength resolution
Light waves spread and bend as they pass through an aperture or round the edge of a barrier. This is a well-known phenomenon called diffraction. Diffraction imposes a limit to the size of objects that we can observe sharply […]
The role of copper in the Ullmann reaction
Organic chemistry uses lots and lots of names. Not only purely chemical names, but people’s names. This is so because the field is so broad that you need to name not only substances, that usually have two names, the official […]
Methane and the determination of the Majorana nature of neutrinos
Experiments performed in 1909 by Geiger and Marsden, also called Rutherford gold foil experiment because Rutherford was their supervisor, led to the discovery of nuclear structure in the atom: the nucleus of the atom is its central core and […]
A family of degradable fermionic Gaussian channels
Quantum computing is the future. Or the present, if you believe that some real quantum computers are commercially available already. Because it is hard to admit that any computer system whose design and theoretical basis depend on quantum effects […]
The dark collapse of merging galaxies as the origin of supermassive black holes
I remember very well my physics professor during my first year at university. She stressed the importance of having clear intuitions of what physical terms mean before any mathematics was invoked. ‘Imagine someone drops an 100-gram apple 1 metre above […]
Extreme decoherence in chaotic quantum systems
In physics there are some well-known fictional characters: the experimenters Alice & Bob, Maxwell’s and Laplace’s demons, or some astronauts travelling at incredible speeds, to name a few. But the queen of them all is a cat. Yes, you guess […]