Author Archives: DIPC
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 […]
A photonic crystal the size of a single free space wavelength
You can read this article because I have used photonics in order to make it possible. It may sound futuristic, but photonics is a technology we use, one way or the other, on a daily basis. Photonic devices are analogous […]
Detection of the reversal of magnetic moments in an antiferromagnet
Some metals, alloys and transition-element salts exhibit a form of magnetism called antiferromagnetism. This occurs below a certain temperature, named after Louis Néel, when an ordered array of atomic magnetic moments spontaneously forms in which alternate moments have opposite directions. […]
Polariton anomalous Hall effect in transition-metal dichalcogenides
Two-dimensional materials, such as transition-metal dichalcogenides embedded in optical cavities, stand out as an excellent platform where strong light-matter interactions can be studied. Moreover, their band structures bring about nontrivial topological features, including the possibility of inducing some really […]
The protective effect of symmetry in entangled photonic states
One of the most mysterious features of quantum mechanics is that if two particles (or photons) interact at some point in time then the properties of these particles will remain connected at future times. A consequence of this is that […]
Catalysis depends on the crystallographic plane of the catalyst
A catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change. As the catalyst itself takes part in the reaction it may undergo a physical change. Hence, if catalysts take […]