We usually think of nature as existing completely independently of us and possessing a definite reality and behaviour even when we are not observing it. For instance, you assume that the world outside of the place where you are now sitting still exists pretty much as it was when you last observed it. Certainly this […]
Condensed matter • Physics • Quantum physics • Theoretical physics
You may have read somewhere that atoms are actually made up mostly of empty space. The usual description goes more or less as follows. At the centre of each atom there is a very tiny nucleus, which carries all of the positive charge and nearly all of the mass of the atom. Surrounding the nucleus […]
Among the group 13 elements, boron alone forms halides of the type X2B-BX2 (X=F, Cl, Br, I), known as tetrahalodiboranes. Over the past five years, the filing of patents involving tetrahalodiboranes has outpaced their appearance in journal articles at a rate of two to one, mostly due to the current interest in B2F4 for the […]
During the last decades, the electronics industry has been very successful in pushing forward the advancement of electronic building blocks, but the limit of silicon-based electronic devices especially in terms of miniaturization are almost reached. There are many ideas how to overcome this problem, for example, by adding functionality based on approaches originating from molecular […]
Adsorption commonly is understood as the reversible binding of molecules and atoms from the gaseous or liquid phase on surfaces, mostly of highly porous adsorbent media. In chemisorption a single layer of molecules, atoms or ions is attached to the adsorbent surface by chemical bonds; in physisorption only van der Waals forces are involved. The […]
Modern organic industrial chemistry started when William Henry Perkin serendipitously synthesized mauveine in 1856 while he was attempting the total synthesis of quinine. Since then, thousands of new organic products have been created in the laboratory for industrial purposes. Among them, in 1913, an orange-red pigment was found, first known as Vat Orange 3 dye […]
What only a decades ago seemed impossible for chemists, determining the chemical structure of molecules directly from experimental images, is now routinely done. Not only that, the information about bond order, intermediates, and products of on-surface chemical reactions or charge distribution within molecules can also be quantified from those images. Two main techniques have made […]
Chemistry • Condensed matter • Energy • Materials • Physics • Quantum physics
Following the need for new and renewable sources of energy worldwide, fuel cells using electrocatalysts can be thought of as viable options. Catalyst materials modify and increase the rate of chemical reactions without itself undergoing any permanent change. An electrocatalyst is a catalyst that participates in electrochemical reactions and that functions at electrode surfaces or […]
When I first started writing about condensed matter science I found some difficulties with a few purely physical concepts, being myself a chemist by education. One of those was ‘polariton’. After some years of reading solid state physics papers and writing about them on a weekly basis, now is a familiar term, but I still […]
We tacitly assume that perfect order exists throughout crystalline materials on an atomic scale when we discuss crystals in general. However, such an idealized solid does not exist at all in nature. All of them contain large numbers of various defects or imperfections. As a matter of fact, many of the properties of materials are […]