Author archives: DIPC

Controlling electron waves by harnessing phase-coherence and interference effects is a cornerstone for future nanoelectronics or quantum computing. To this end, design of platforms with well-defined, narrow, and low-loss propagation channels is essential. Nanoporous graphene (NPG) holds great potential for distributing and controlling currents on the nanoscale. But the effects derived from the wave nature […]

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 metals will be needed. The point is: what might happen if the resources used for manufacturing common […]

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 femtoseconds, that is, measuring things that take some tens or hundreds of 10-15 seconds to occur. To […]

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 ordinary insulator in the bulk but have conducting states on their boundaries, i.e., edges or […]

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 what nature has already come up with. This is the case with photosynthesis, a process […]

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 using light of a given wavelength, for a given microscope will have a minimum aperture, and […]

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 – from IUPAC rules – and the nickname, usually much shorter and easier to remember […]

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 contains most of its mass and the nucleus is positively charged. Further research during the next […]

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 for their operation may be on the market today, even though IBM says otherwise. The trick […]

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 your head’, she would say; ‘the pain you feel is the equivalent of a joule […]