Author: Gabriele Dalla Torre is a Ph.D. student (ITN-EJD-TCCM) at UPV/EHU Aluminum is the third most abundant element in Earth’s crust, after oxygen and silicon. As a consequence, during the last century, human intervention has made aluminum so highly bioavailable that C. Exley, one of the leading researcher on Al(III) biochemistry, stated that we are […]
Author: María A. Izquierdo-Morelos is a Ph.D. student (ITN-EJD-TCCM) at University of Groningen Over the past several decades researchers have thought how materials and device architectures can efficiently convert solar radiation into electrical power through the photovoltaic effect. Those efforts have led to different methods and processes to produce green energy. In this context, organic […]
Author: Stefano Battaglia is a Ph.D. student (ITN-EJD-TCCM) at Université de Toulouse III Since the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in 2010 to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for groundbreaking discoveries on the two-dimensional material graphene, the research in low-dimensional carbon nanostructures has seen an incredible increase of interest. Among the different types of […]
Author: Ewa N. Szlapa is a is a Ph.D. student (ITN-EJD-TCCM) at Catholic University of Leuven At the beginning of the development of chemistry as a science there was alchemy, which was considered to be a magicians’ business. An alchemist put some ingredients into the glass vessel and after some time the mixture inside could […]
Author: Tommaso Francese is a Ph.D. student (ITN-EJD-TCCM) at Universitat de Barcelona Every year the amount of data produced is of the order of magnitude of the Avogadro’s constant, thus 6.028×10 23 . Let’s say that it is more or less the quantity of hydrogen atoms contained in 1 gram. This trend is supposed to […]
In order to study new solid state magnetic properties appropiate new laboratory models are needed. In particular, there is a necessity for a substrate to investigate new forms of magnetic coupling with nanoscale ferromagnets and the exotic physics at the interface with semiconductor or superconductor materials. Now a team of researchers from DIPC and some […]
Al13 − is one of the most attractive of the so-called magic clusters. It has a perfect icosahedral symmetry with an aluminum atom at the center, a closed-shell electronic configuration (40 electrons), and a large highest occupied molecular orbital−lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (HOMO− LUMO) gap. These features result in an unusual stability and chemical inertness […]
Condensed matter • Materials • Nanotechnology • Physics • Quantum physics
Silicon surfaces of crystalline solids are part of conventional electronics, but their exploitation in novel materials combining two-dimensional electron states (2DESs) and magnetism, which play an important role in the development of next-generation electronics, still remains elusive. The appearance of 2DESs at surfaces or interfaces and their interplay with magnetic degrees of freedom may open […]
In the early days of organic chemistry, the word aromatic was used to describe fragrant substances such as benzene (from coal distillate), benzaldehyde (from cherries, peaches, and almonds), and toluene (from tolu balsam). It was soon realized, however, that substances classed as aromatic differed from most other organic compounds in their chemical behaviour. Today, the […]
As the search for renewable energy sources has intensified, the discovery of efficient and cheap technologies for exploiting the energy from the sunlight has emerged as a key challenge. Higher efficiency plays an increasingly important role in making competitive solar cell designs as the price of silicon continues to drop. At present, the actual silicon […]