A strange couple of years…

It’s been a strange couple of years with worldwide issues that have affected us all. But here at Scixel, we can be nothing but grateful. First of all, the pandemic didn’t affect us in a serious way, neither us nor our families. Second, our clients continued with their usual hard work from home. And that deserves a huge ovation for the scientists all over the world. Their effort did not only kept us on business, but in better shape than ever. And finally, we kept working with Filmociencia and started working with Patricia Bondia, and that alone is something to be grateful for.

Here I leave you with a short summary of our work during the last two years. And as always, thank you all for making Scixel possible.

 

Cool radio waves

How do you cool radio waves? Do waves have a temperature in the first place? Common waves are hot meaning they are noisy. There are multiple sources of noise in the generation process of waves and some of them are related to temperature. One of these sources, and probably the most difficult to remove, comes from the intrinsic random motion of atoms.

A possible solution would be to conventionally cool down the antennas that emit the waves. But even at temperatures of miliKelvin, the jiggling of atoms produce a significant amount of noise.

A group of researchers at TuDelft led by Prof. Gary Steel have managed to cool radio waves to their quantum ground state and the process is as surprising as it is difficult to grasp. They’ve placed a circuit close to the antenna that gets coupled to it via its magnetic field. This circuit then acts as a “vaccum cleaner” that absorbs entropy from the antenna cooling it down.

This cooling process and subsequent noise reduction, published in Science Advances, will be of the utmost importance in detectors in a wide range of devices and purposes: from NMR to astronomical detectors.

We made this animation with the help of Dr. Ines Rodrigues (first author of the paper) and Prof. Gary Steele to illustrate the process.

 

The Saga goes on!

The Saga of the Third Daughter has reached its fourth chapter: The Battle of the Giants in which the origin of the oceans is told. In the following months, life will appear and it will establish the principles of a huge disaster. But that is yet to come.


The Third Daughter

We’ve started a new project called The Saga of the Third Daughter, a series of videos telling the story of the Great Oxidation Event. Interestingly, or so we think, these videos are not designed to be part of an outreach project. We wanted to tell this story as if it was a classic creation myth.

Sadly, for the moment, the videos will be only in Spanish, although an English voice over would be an option in the future.

Here we present the first Book, hope you like it!

You can check the following releases here. Also, in the website we “translate” the poetry of the tale and explain the real story in which the saga is base.

Topographic reconstruction

With today’s free tools and open information (satellite images, topography, etc) it is pretty straightforward to reconstruct real places and to present geographical information. Just an example:

A strain tunable single-layer MoS2 photodetector

Lets take a single layer of MoS2. Lets attach it to a surface in such a way that it can be stretched (or compressed) and there you have it: A strain tunable single-layer MoS2 photodetector. A device which uses strain to change the electrical and optical properties of 2D materials. In particular they’ve proven that with this method, they can reversibly change the photoresponsivity, the response time and the spectral bandwidth of single layered MoS2.

At Dr. Castellanos Lab, they are excelling at beautiful and elegant research. “… we demonstrated that applying tensile biaxial strain to the MoS2 device can be an effective strategy to increase both the responsivity and the wavelength bandwidth of the photodetector (at the expense of a slower response time), while compressive strain can be exploited to yield faster photodetectors (although with a lower photoresponse and with a narrower wavelength bandwidth). This adaptable optoelectronic performance of this device can be very useful to adjust the photodetector operation to different lighting conditions, similarly to human eye adaptability (scotopic vision during the night vs. photopic vision during the daylight).

Their research is a collaboration between ICMM-CSIC, Imdea Nanociencia and the State Key Laboratory of Tribology, Tsinghua University, Beijing and has been recognized with the inner cover of Materials Today.

Join the FTMC!

Condensed matter physics is a big unknown, even for 2nd year physics students, let alone theoretical condensed matter physics. And funny enough, this branch of physics covers a huge percentage of the reality around us. It covers quantum physics, biophysics, fluids, materials, optics and acoustics, or low temperatures, just to name a few of its interests. Yet, few people know about it.

At the Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics department, at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid are actively trying to fill this gap. They’ve made a video to inform and try to bring closer students and young people to this beautiful and amazing area of science. And Scixel happened to be around.

 

We’ve spend a great time working with them, discussing and creating this piece. Hope you like it and pay them a visit!

Dust: the origin

We already talked about the project NANOCOSMOS in this website. This is a huge ERC funded project directed by Prof. José Cernicharo which has put together research groups from Spain and France. The researchers working in this project are trying to “unveil the physical and chemical conditions in the dust formation zone of evolved stars.

A year ago, Natalia Ruiz Zelmanovitch (Public Information Officer of the project), approached me to create a short documentary explaining the aims of this research. Now, a year later, its been made public. Scixel worked both in the animations and the music. Hope you enjoy this piece as much as we enjoyed making it.

Apart from the pleasure that is to work with Natalia, the intrinsic beauty of this research, made this collaboration a big moment of Scixel’s short history.

Demoreel 2017-2018

This demo has taken two years… documentaries, advertising, covers, pictures… we’ve been pretty busy lately.

Single-Molecules remember!

Our story with Basel University and in particular with Prof. Thomas Jung, goes back a long way. They are not only really nice people. They always come to me with amazingly beautiful pieces of research.

This time, Prof. Jung, together with Aisha Ahsan, have reported a new method that allows to change the physical state of just a few atoms or molecules within a network. Their efforts are focused in the manipulation of tiny molecules. The smaller the better. Why? Because this systems are perfect candidates for data storage. And the smaller the bits (molecules), the less energy it will take to modify them.


We did this picture to illustrate their research and also an animation that appeared in the video abstract of the paper.

You can read more here.