Packaging is essential to preserve the food quality and safety and to extend the shelf life of the stored product reducing the food waste. In this sector, plastics are the material of choice because they are cheap, lightweight and easy to process. The main requirement for packaging materials is to maintain the food in good […]
Man does not live by hardware alone. Indeed, great material and conceptual improvements in the machinery of optical microscopes have occurred in recent decades. The examples are numerous (some example here; https://mappingignorance.org/2013/12/23/bessel-beam-plane-illumination-microscopy-another-smart-solution-for-an-old-challenge/). However, what is being achieved only with software and computing power seems a matter of magic. It is not only that programs and […]
Coffee is one of the most widely consumed drinks in the world. Several brewing methods can be used to prepare it depending on the consumer’s taste – or the lack of it – as well as cultural and geographical habits. My father, for example, had a ritual every time he wanted a coffee. He took […]
Condensed matter • Materials • Nanotechnology • Quantum physics
The so-called van der Waals materials consist of two-dimensional layers bound by weak van der Waals forces. After the isolation of graphene, the field of two-dimensional van der Waals materials has experienced an explosive growth and new families of two-dimensional systems and block-layered bulk materials have been created. This growth has been fueled mainly by […]
Condensed matter • Materials • Nanotechnology • Quantum physics
For centuries, metals were employed in optical applications only as mirrors and gratings. New vistas opened up in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the discovery of surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) and the use of surface plasmon (collective electronic oscillations at the surface of metals) resonances for sensing. In a simplified picture and in […]
Elements with 4f or 5f electrons in unfilled electron bands and their componuds , which have ions carrying magnetic moments but do not magnetically order, or only do so at very low temperatures, are generally known as heavy-fermion or heavy electron systems because the scattering of the conduction electrons with the magnetic ions results in […]
Condensed matter • Materials • Physics • Quantum physics • Theoretical physics
We all know what an insulator is, don’t we? An insulator is any substance that is a poor conductor of heat and electricity. Both properties ussually occur as a consequence of a lack of mobile electrons.If we want to dive a little deeper into the nature of insulators we make use of energy band theory […]
For a successful application in spintronics of any material, a key problem is to get a reliable control of the electronic spin within it. An ideal candidate for this purpose would be any material which is non-magnetic in the bulk but has a tunable ferromagnetic surface layer with a large splitting of the spin-up and […]
Computer science • Mathematics • Mechanical Engineering • Robotics
One thing is designing an object in a computer, and another, quite different, is producing it as a real 3D object. All other things being equal, in general the more curves the designed object has, the more difficult it is to produce. Mathematics can be very helpful in this task. The geometric modeling of a […]
If a nucleus has a nonzero spin, it behaves as a small magnet. Therefore, in an external magnetic field, the nuclear magnetic moment vector precesses about the field direction but only certain otientations are allowed by quantum rules. Thus, for hydrogen (spin 1/2) there are two possible states in the presence of a field, each […]