Polaritons attract wide attention due to their ability to confine and guide light at the nanometre scale. These capacities are key for the development of ultrasmall resonators and waveguides that can be used for sensing, heat transfer and optical circuitry applications. But, what are polaritons in the first place? If, for the sake of the […]
Our modern rechargeable batteries, such as lithium-ion batteries, are anything but sustainable. One alternative is organic batteries with redox-organic electrode materials (OEMs), which can be synthesized from natural “green” materials. A Chinese team has now introduced a new OEM for aqueous organic high-capacity batteries that can be easily and cheaply recycled. Traditional inorganic electrode materials […]
geopolymer Author: Ada Martinelli holds a PhD in organic chemistry and is a researcher in an Italian ceramics company The construction industry is one of the major exploiters of natural resources, and it has a great contribution to the greenhouse gas emissions and non-sustainable development of the global economy. Nowadays, it still mostly relies on […]
Food waste represents a serious problem associated with today’s society to which a solution should be found. A notable share of the impacts originates from the fishing sector. It hardly results acceptable that, in a world with shrinking food resources, 25% of the total fishing catches end up being discarded as waste. It should be […]
A new process that lets scientists chemically cut apart and stitch together nanoscopic layers of two-dimensional materials — like a tailor altering a suit — could be just the tool for designing the technology of a sustainable energy future. Researchers have developed a method for structurally splitting, editing and reconstituting layered materials, called MAX phases […]
Mermin–Wagner The demand for computational power is increasing exponentially, following the amount of data generated across different devices, applications and cloud platforms. To keep up with this trend, smaller and increasingly energy-efficient devices must be developed, which require the study of compounds not yet explored in data-storage technologies. The discovery of magnetically stable 2D van […]
Lithium-ion batteries have remained unrivalled in terms of overall performance for several applications, as evidenced by their widespread use in everything from portable electronics to cellular base stations. However, they suffer from some important disadvantages that are difficult to ignore. For one, lithium is rather expensive, and the fact that it is being mined at […]
Condensed matter • DIPC Interfaces • Materials • Quantum physics
Surfaces are at the frontier of every solid. They provide versatile supports for functional nanostructures and mediate essential physicochemical processes. Intimately related to two-dimensional materials, interfaces and atomically thin films often feature distinct electronic states with respect to the bulk, which is key to many relevant properties, such as catalytic activity, interfacial charge-transfer, and crystal […]
Gel-like materials that can be injected into the body hold great potential to heal injured tissues or manufacture entirely new tissues. Many researchers are working to develop these hydrogels for biomedical uses, but so far very few have made it into the clinic. To help guide in the development of such materials, which are made […]
Chemistry • DIPC Computational and Theoretical Chemistry • Materials
Nonlinear optics is concerned with the optical properties of matter subjected to intense electromagnetic fields. For nonlinearity to manifest itself, the external field should not be negligible compared to the internal fields of atoms and molecules of which the matter consists. Lasers are capable of generating external fields sufficiently intense for nonlinearity to occur. Actually […]