Publications related to Titanium oxides and silicates as high-kappa dielectrics: A first-principles investigation

Organic matters, but inorganic matters too: column examination of elevated mercury sorption on low organic matter aquifer material using concentrations and stable isotope ratios

Sorption of mercury (Hg) in soils is suggested to be predominantly associated with organic matter (OM). However, there is a growing collection of research that suggests that clay minerals and oxides are also important solid phases for the sorption of solu ...

2024

Microstructure - Electrochemical Surface Reactivity Relationship of Electrochemically Grown Manganese Oxides Films

Roberto Cestaro

This Thesis provides a comprehensive and correlative investigation of the microstructure, chemical state, and electrochemical reactivity of manganese oxide (MnOx) films, aiming to gain a deeper understanding of the deposition and dissolution mechanism of M ...

EPFL2024

Ru(II)-Arene Complexes of Curcumin and Bisdesmethoxycurcumin Metabolites

Paul Joseph Dyson, Farzaneh Fadaei Tirani, Mouna Hadiji

Curcuminoids and their complexes continue to attract attention in medicinal chemistry, but little attention has been given to their metabolic derivatives. Here, the first examples of (arene)Ru(II) complexes with curcuminoid metabolites, tetrahydrocurcumin ...

Amer Chemical Soc2024

Impact of Annealing on ZrO2 Nanotubes for Photocatalytic Application

Sami Rtimi

This work aims to study the structural, optical, and photocatalytic properties of ZrO2 nanotubes (NTs) that have been synthesized using the electrochemical anodization method. The structural and morphological characteristics of unannealed and annealed (400 ...

MDPI2023

First-Principles Thermodynamics of CsSnI3

Nicola Marzari, Lorenzo Monacelli

CsSnI3 is a promising ecofriendly solution for energy harvesting technologies. It exists at room temperature in either a black perovskite polymorph or a yellow 1D double-chain, which irreversibly deteriorates in the air. In this work, we unveil the relativ ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2023

Murunskite - a new class of functional material

Davor Tolj

The subject of the present work is discovery and in-depth characterization of a new class of functional materials. Tuning of the bond polarity and orbital occupation with a goal of establishing balance between localization and delocalization of electrons - ...

EPFL2023

NMR Crystallography in the Big Data Era: New Methods and Applications Powered by Machine Learning

Manuel Cordova

Structure determination of materials is key to understanding their physical properties. While single-crystal X-ray diffraction is the gold standard for structures displaying long-range order, many materials of interest are polycrystalline and/or disordered ...

EPFL2023

A data-driven interpretation of the stability of organic molecular crystals

Michele Ceriotti, Edgar Albert Engel, Maria Pakhnova

Due to the subtle balance of intermolecular interactions that govern structure-property relations, predicting the stability of crystal structures formed from molecular building blocks is a highly non-trivial scientific problem. A particularly active and fr ...

ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY2023

Controlling the crystal structure of succinic acid via microfluidic spray-drying

Aysu Ceren Okur, Esther Amstad

Many properties of materials, including their dissolution kinetics, hardness, and optical appearance, depend on their structure. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to control the structure of low molecular weight organic compounds that have a high propen ...

ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY2023

Microstructure et usinabilité d'alliages de titane béta-métastable

Loïc Favre

Titanium has become in recent years an interesting material in many applications that require a combination of high mechanical properties and low density. It has the peculiarity of undergoing an allotropic transformation at 882°C. Below this temperature, ...

EPFL2023

Direct Observation of the Phase Transition in C60 Fullerene

Chengcheng Yan

In the third study, the order-disorder phase transition of single-crystal C60 is studied using time-resolved electron microscopy. Solid C60 undergoes a first-order phase transition upon heating to 260 K. This is a structural transition from the low-tempera ...

EPFL Infoscience2023

Charge multipole correlations and order in Cs2TaCl6

Henrik Moodysson Rønnow, Ivica Zivkovic, Jana Pásztorová, Jian Rui Soh

We examine the role of charge, structural, and spin degrees of freedom in the previously poorly understood phase transition in the 5d1 transition-metal double perovskite Cs2TaCl6 using a combination of computational and experimental techniques. Our heat ca ...

AMER PHYSICAL SOC2023

Melting pseudosymmetry and thermal expansion in 3-benzoylpropionic acid

Tomasz Poreba

The thermal behavior of 3-benzoylpropionic acid (BPA) was investigated using single-crystal and synchrotron powder X-diffraction, as well as differential scanning calorimetry analysis. The study revealed the existence of two subtly distinct structures of B ...

ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY2023

Synthesis of polysiloxane elastomers modified with sulfonyl side groups and their electromechanical response

Holger Frauenrath, Yauhen Sheima

Dielectric elastomer transducers are elastic capacitors that respond to mechanical or electrical stress. They can be used in applications such as millimeter-sized soft robots and harvesters of the energy contained in ocean waves. The dielectric component o ...

Royal Society of Chemistry2023

Pressure-freezing of dodecane: exploring the crystal structures, formation kinetics and phase diagrams for colossal barocaloric effects in n-alkanes

Tomasz Poreba

Barocaloric (BC) materials provide cheaper and more energy efficient alternatives to traditional refrigerants. Some liquid alkanes were recently shown to exhibit a colossal BC effect, matching the entropy changes in commercial vapour-liquid refrigerants. D ...

Royal Soc Chemistry2023

Anomalous topological waves in strongly amorphous scattering networks

Romain Christophe Rémy Fleury, Pierre Delplace, Zhechen Zhang

Topological insulators are crystalline materials that have revolutionized our ability to control wave transport. They provide us with unidirectional channels that are immune to obstacles, defects, or local disorder and can even survive some random deformat ...

2023

New methods for structure determination and speciation by NMR crystallography

Martins Balodis

NMR crystallography has been around for half a century, but with the advent of NMR crystal structure determination protocols in the last decade it has shown perspectives that were not seen before. Amalgamation of NMR and crystal structure determination has ...

EPFL2022

Accurate and efficient band-gap predictions for metal halide perovskites at finite temperature

Alfredo Pasquarello, Patrick Gono, Thomas Bischoff, Aleksei Tal, Haiyuan Wang

We develop a computationally efficient scheme to accurately determine finite-temperature band gaps for metal halide perovskites belonging to the class ABX(3) (A = Rb, Cs; B = Ge, Sn, Pb; and X = F, Cl, Br, I). First, an initial estimate of the band gap is ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2022

Molecular insights into the electrical double layer of colloidal oxide particles obtained through second harmonic scattering

Marie Bischoff

Photocatalytic applications play an essential role in the search for alternative energy sources and environmental decontamination techniques. It is of fundamental interest to understand on a molecular level the aqueous solid/liquid interface, where photoca ...

EPFL2022

An elementary treatment on the diffraction of crystalline structures

Gervais Chapuis

Although W. L. Bragg's law can be easily derived for beginners in the field of crystallography, its interpretation however seems to cause some difficulties which lies essentially in the relation between the concept of lattice planes and the unit cell const ...

2022