Category Archives: Cover

Red light

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A new small molecule, a hexabenzoovalene derivative, also called nanographene due to its similarities with the ubiquitous molecule, has been discovered to be a stable, bright, and efficient red emitter. This molecule has a highly distorted structure. This avoids aggregation, an important enemy of efficiency, thus leading to the possibility of fabricating highly emissive thin films. At the same time, it is electrochemically stable resulting in extrapolated high stabilities (~13.000 hours).

This work is the product of a collaboration between IMDEA Materials, IMDEA Nanociencia, both in Madrid and Ruprecht-Karls-UniversitÀt in Heidelberg.

This findings have been published in Nanoscale Horizons and this picture, designed under the supervision of Elisa Fresta (IMDEA Materials), first author of the paper, has been awarded with the cover of the journal.

 

Listen to your heart!

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Topological insulators (TIs) are way beyond my understanding but at the same time I cant help but appreciate its beauty. TIs are usually associated with photonics but are showing to be useful also in the fields of acoustics and mechanics. Dr. Johan Christensen in a collaborative research between Spain and China (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Nanjing University) has “experimentally explored topologically robust corner states across three different frequency bands,  measured sound intensity concentration in the long wavelength regime comprising highly confined corner states of diameter 50 times smaller than the sound wavelength”.

As a proof of concept, they’ve designed a physical pattern that produces an intensity sound pattern in a beautiful heart shape: art and science at its best! Their research has been published in Advanced Materials. The hallmark and key manifestation of topological states is the robustness against defects. In this context, the authors additionally demonstrate that the proposed deep‐subwavelength TI displays remarkable resilience against bulk disorder over the said frequency area, making this concept remarkably robust for real world applications.

Drug Transport in 3D Tumor Model

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We’ve already work for Prof. Calderon and his group in the past. They seem the kind of people that work directly to enlarge our life expectancy. Their main research is focused in the delivery of drugs through physiological barriers. They’ve made an important advance recently by studying how nanogels can help in the transport of drugs inside tumor tissue.

Their research, reported in Theranostics, has been awarded with the cover of the journal.

On Wireless BioSensors!

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The last paper of T. Ruzgas, J. Sotres etal at Malmö University (Sweden) starts with a disturbing statement: “It is predicted that with the development of Internet of Things technology by 2025 we expect more than 1000 connected devices per human”. With this idea in mind they are studying how to develop robust and cheap biosensors that will provide us with health information. And for that they are exploiting the ability of enzymes to “establish direct electron transfer contact with electrically conducting materials”.

 

This research, that made it to the cover of ChemElectroChem, is getting us closer to a cyborg-like healthier future.

DIPC 2018 Activity Report

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One of our pictures was recently used to illustrate DIPC’s 2018 activity report. Lots of great friends there doing amazing research work!

On frogs, tadpoles and better batteries

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My vast ignorance of chemistry doesn’t allow me to talk about this article, so here I leave you the abstract:

“Trapping negative charges in polymer electrolytes using a frog‐shaped, ether‐functionalized anion (EFA) is presented by H. Zhang, J. Carrasco, M. Armand, and co‐workers in their Communication on page 12070 ff. The bis(trifluoromethanesulfonyl)imide anion (TFSI), shown as a slippery tadpole, is highly mobile in poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) matrix. In contrast, the ethylene oxide legs in EFA endow trapping interactions between the anion and PEO, which suppresses mobility”. [read more]

I did this picture on request and under close supervision of Dr. Heng Zang and Dr. Javier Carrasco (CIC Energigune, Spain). It deserved the inside cover of Angewandte Chemie (two in a row!).

 

Nature already did it!

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Protein based electronics. I’ll say it again. Protein based electronics. Dr. Linda Zotty and Prof. Carlos Cuevas (IFIMAC, Spain) are working in something that stills looks like science fiction to me: protein-bioelectronics.

In particular they are studying how to turn a redox protein (Cytochrome C) into a viable switch. These proteins belong to a family of redox-active proteins that act as electron carriers in biological energy conversion systems (as in those involved in cellular respiration). Together with groups from the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel) and Shemyakin-Ovchinnikov Institute of Bioorganic chemistry (Russia), they’ve theoretically shown how a Gold-Cytochrome-Gold structure can work as a voltage controlled switch.

Their research has been published in Angewandte Chemie and has been presented in the inside back cover.

 

A strain tunable single-layer MoS2 photodetector

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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.

It comes in colors everywhere

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A research group at IMDEA Nanociencia (together with the University of Grenoble and Berkeley) have presented a new switchable iron-based coordination polymer, which works as a reversible acetonitrile sensor.

Coordination polymers are emerging as molecular sensing materials for a variety of reasons: they are not toxic, environmentally friendly and above all, they’re highly responsive to a wide variety of external stimuli.

This polymer in particular, the unutterable ∞{[Fe(H2O)2(CH3CN)2(pyrazine)](BF4)2·(CH3CN)2}, happens to be an excellent acetonitrile sensor: a toxic volatile organic compound, that makes its detection a major issue. The desorption of interstitial acetonitrile changes reversibly the color of the polymer together with its electronic and magneto–structural properties.

On request of José Sånchez Costa and Enrique Burzuri we made this picture, showing the reversibility of the process, that made it to the back cover of Chemical Science.