Inorganic and organic light-emitting diodes (ILEDs and OLEDs, respectively) are quickly replacing incandescent light bulbs and compact fluorescent lamps. The reasons for the success are easy to understand. For instance, ILEDs’ performance has met the market requirements for in-/out-door applications with single-point sources. However, ILEDs cannot be considered a sustainable solution as of today. One […]
Not all matter in the universe is visible. The mass of matter that cannot be “seen” by direct observatops of its emitted or absorbed electromagnetic radiation is called dark matter. In the current lambda-Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) paradigm, the most accepted “theory to model the Universe in large scales”, so-called baryonic (visible) matter assembles where […]
A cement is any of various substances used for bonding or setting to a hard material. A popular one, Portland cement, is a mixture of calcium silicates and aluminates made by heating limestone (CaCO3) with clay (that contains aluminosilicates) in a kiln. The product is then ground to a fine powder. When Portland cement is […]
Any person with some basic knowledge of chemistry is familiar with the concept of electrolysis, i.e., the production of a chemical reaction by passing an electric current through an electrolyte – a liquid that conducts electricity as a result of the presence of ions. It has found major applications since the early days of modern […]
An atomic state in which two spin angular momenta of electrons cancel each other, resulting in zero net spin, is called a singlet. If the angular momenta combine to give a total non-zero spin, then that state is called a triplet. A triplet state usually has lower, sometimes substantially lower, energy than a singlet. Importantly […]
Some materials have special universal properties 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. So-called topological insulators are electronic materials that have a bulk band gap like an ordinary insulator but have conducting states on their […]
Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are layered compounds which can be thinned down to the single-layer limit. While mechanical exfoliation generates atomically thin TMD flakes possessing an area of a few square microns, chemical and physical methods provide high-quality monolayers on large-area substrates, which are suitable for actual technological applications. TMDs are a class of van […]
Electrons do not move around nuclei in defined curved orbits. Our current understanding of how electrons are to be found in atoms and molecules is based on clouds of probability called orbitals as it is not possible to give a definite path for an electron. Thus, an orbital is a region in which an electron […]
Catalysis-based approaches for the activation of anticancer rely on the use of metal catalysts capable of deprotecting inactive precursors of organic drugs or transforming key biomolecules available in the cellular environment. Nevertheless, the efficiency of most of the schemes described so far is rather low, limiting the benefits of catalytic amplification as a strategy for […]
The advent of on-surface chemistry under vacuum has vastly increased our capabilities to synthesize carbon nanomaterials with atomic precision. Among the types of target structures that have been synthesized by these means, one-dimensional graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) have probably attracted the most attention, and for a good reason: t he enormous tunability of GNRs’ electronic properties […]