Building electronic devices often requires stacking different crystalline materials on top of one another with atomic precision. This process, called heteroepitaxy, works best when the two crystals share similar atomic patterns. When their symmetries differ, the upper crystal tends to grow in several orientations at once instead of a single one, creating defects that degrade […]
Chemistry • DIPC Computational and Theoretical Chemistry • Quantum chemistry
Chemical bonds are among the most familiar ideas in science. They explain why hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water, why carbon atoms build long chains in organic molecules, and why every substance has the shape and properties it does. Yet, despite their central role in chemistry, bonds are not directly observable objects. They are […]
Light can do remarkable things, but it has limitations. Ordinary photons are bound by diffraction, which sets a limit on how tightly they can be confined in space. This is why focusing light to spots smaller than about half its wavelength is so difficult. But in certain materials, photons couple to vibrations of atoms or […]
When Georg Ohm wired up pieces of copper in 1827, he struck a rule so robust that it still underpins every phone and supercomputer on Earth: double the current, double the voltage. Simple, linear, universal—or so we thought. Over the past decade physicists have discovered that this bedrock principle crumbles the moment a crystal loses […]
Imagine a glass of water or a bottle of ethanol. These are molecular liquids, substances where molecules are free to move but are still closely packed, interacting with each other through forces like hydrogen bonds or weaker attractions. Scientists have long been fascinated by how these molecules move and interact, especially at scales that are […]
In the world of nanophotonics, the ability to control light with precision at the nanoscale is a game-changing goal. Recent advancements in materials science have opened up new pathways for achieving this, particularly through the use of van der Waals (vdW) crystals. These ultra-thin materials, composed of layers of atoms held together by weak van […]
Spintronics is a field of technology that focuses on using the spin of electrons—an intrinsic property that can be thought of as a tiny magnetic moment—to store and process information. This concept is based on the fact that electrons, in addition to carrying electric charge, also have a “spin,” which can be oriented in different […]
In organic chemistry, π-stacking systems are supramolecular structures that arise due to the dispersion force, a type of intermolecular noncovalent interaction. They are a common occurrence in nature. The stabilized structure of DNA is a very prominent example of a π-stacking system, and so are the arrangement of amino acids in certain proteins. Interestingly, π-stacking […]
Magnetic two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors have attracted a lot of attention because modern preparation techniques are capable of providing single crystal films of these materials with precise control of thickness down to the single-layer limit. It opens up a way to study a rich variety of electronic and magnetic phenomena with promising routes towards potential applications […]
Some materials have special universal properties protected against perturbations. Such properties are theoretically described by topology, a branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of geometrical objects that are unchanged by continuous deformations. So-called topological insulators are electronic materials that have a bulk band gap like an ordinary insulator but have conducting states on their […]