System paves the way for many applications

30-May-2022

Scientists from Hamburg and Munich developed the world's most powerful dual-comb spectrometer that paves the way for many applications in atmospheric science and biomedical diagnostics, such as early cancer detection. The work has recently been published in Nature Communications. The core part of ...

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Physicists used for the first time laser light to control the location of light-induced reactions on the surface of nanoparticles

23-May-2022

Controlling strong electromagnetic fields on nanoparticles is the key to triggering targeted molecular reactions on their surfaces. Such control over strong fields is achieved via laser light. Although laser-induced formation and breaking of molecular bonds on nanoparticle surfaces have been ...

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Chemists have shown that organocatalysts go through an evolution and could have played an important role in the emergence of life

20-Jan-2022

Chemical evolution took place on the early Earth before the biological one: Out of simple abiotic molecules, there emerged increasingly complex networks of chemical reactions and ultimately the first building blocks of life. Analogously to its biological counterpart, chemical evolution is based ...

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Scientists developed a technique to avoid CO2 in energy conversion processes with carbon-containing fuels

19-Nov-2021

Nature knows several ways how to capture carbon dioxide (CO2). The most prominent one is photosynthesis, where sun light is used to fix CO2 into biomass. Nowadays, research groups around the world try hard to mimic this process and to realize artificial photosynthesis. The ultimate goal is to ...

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International research team finds atomically-thin carbon generates its own magnetic field

08-Oct-2021

Usually, the electrical resistance of a material depends very much on its physical dimensions and fundamental properties. Under special circumstances, however, this resistance can adopt a fixed value that is independent of the basic material properties and “quantised” (meaning that it changes in ...

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Using DNA structures as scaffolds, Tim Liedl has shown that precisely positioned gold nanoparticles can serve as efficient energy transmitters

09-Apr-2021

Since the inception of the field in 2006, laboratories around the world have been exploring the use of ‘DNA origami’ for the assembly of complex nanostructures. The method is based on DNA strands with defined sequences that interact via localized base pairing. “With the aid of short strands with ...

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How long-chain molecules are formed

24-Feb-2021

Before life emerged on Earth, many physicochemical processes on our planet were highly chaotic. A plethora of small compounds, and polymers of varying lengths, made up of subunits (such as the bases found in DNA and RNA), were present in every conceivable combination. Before life-like chemical ...

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Researchers simplify the MINFLUX microscope and have succeeded in differentiating molecules that are extremely close together and tracking their dynamics.

21-Jan-2021

Only a few years ago, an ostensibly fundamental resolution limit in optical microscopy was superseded - a breakthrough which in 2014 led to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for super-resolution microscopy. Since then, there has been another quantum leap in this area, which has further reduced the ...

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Watching metamaterials at work in real time using ultrafast electron diffraction

26-Nov-2020

Physicists from the University of Konstanz, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich) and the University of Regensburg have successfully demonstrated that ultrashort electron pulses experience a quantum mechanical phase shift through their interaction with light waves in nanophotonic ...

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Chemist reports a reaction pathway in which minerals catalyze the formation of sugars in the absence of water

22-Oct-2020

Organic molecules formed the basis for the evolution of life. But how could inorganic precursors have given rise to them? Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich chemist Oliver Trapp now reports a reaction pathway in which minerals catalyze the formation of sugars in the absence of ...

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