Category archives: Condensed matter

The Pioneer plaques are a pair of gold–anodized aluminium plaques which were placed on board the 1972 Pioneer 10 and 1973 Pioneer 11 spacecraft, featuring a pictorial message, in case either Pioneer 10 or 11 is intercepted by extraterrestrial life. The plaques show the nude figures of a human male and female along with several […]

Antimicrobial resistance is a complex problem that contributes to health and economic losses worldwide. Resistance to antimicrobial therapies reduces the effectiveness of current drugs, leading to increased morbidity, mortality, and health care expenditure. Because globalization increases the vulnerability of any country to diseases occurring in other countries, resistance presents a major threat to global public […]

Graphene is one of the most promising materials for nanoelectronics owing to its unique Dirac cone-like dispersion of the electronic state and high mobility of the charge carriers. We all know that already, provided we are a little bit interested in condensed matter physics. But the point is that, in order to facilitate the implementation […]

How would you measure the dynamic viscosity of cytosol, the liquid inside the cells, without destroying the cell? It seems not an easy task. However, a team of researchers that includes Nuno de Sousa (DIPC & IFIMAC), has just provided a way of achieving this and other similar feats using upconverting particles. An optical trap […]

Worldwide research efforts on plasmons and metamaterials have been growing exponentially for the past ten years. Now, Antonio I. Fernández-Domínguez (IFIMAC), Francisco J. García-Vidal (IFIMAC & DIPC), and Luis Martín-Moreno (ICMA) discuss new directions for the future, such as the use of 2D materials and strong coupling phenomena, which are likely to shape the field […]

Imagine there exist a material in which an electron could be split into two quasiparticles. These two quasiparticles both would carry electric charge, move in opposite directions but could not move backwards. Furthermore these quasiparticles would be massless. And we can give them a fancy name, Weyl fermions. This seems to be at odds with […]

Graphene nanoribbons (GNRs), are strips of graphene with ultra-thin width (<50 nm). Graphene ribbons were introduced as a theoretical model by Mitsutaka Fujita and coauthors to examine the edge and nanoscale size effect in graphene. GNRs are very interesting structures, partly due to their attractive electronic properties. Those properties vary dramatically with changes in the […]

Beginning in 1928, Felix Bloch, an assistant to Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig, began to make some realistic assumptions in an attempt to formulate a more complete quantum mechanics of electrical conductivity. First, because he wanted to assign a definite momentum and energy to each of the electrons, but not a definite position or a time […]

During World War II the Germans relied on their strong chemical knowledge to overcome the limited access to critical raw materials that the circumstances of the war itself imposed. One of these raw materials was Chilean saltpeter (sodium nitrate), which was the base for explosives. The solution was to use a chemical process designed to […]

Common glass, used in windows or bottles, for example, is made by heating a mixture of calcium oxide (lime), sodium carbonate (soda), and silicon (IV) oxide (sand), resulting in a calcium silicate. This silicate is not a crystal but a solid in which atoms are random and have no long-range orderd pattern. These kind of […]