A Graphene Odissey

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I know I say this a lot, but one of the main benefits of this job is that you get to know about cool projects like that of GrapheneX. Simply put, the GrapheneX team from TUDelft, is studying the potential use of graphene-based materials as solar sails. Light from the Sun or a laser beam is used to transfer momentum to a sail making possible to move low mass objects.

This transport technology has already been successfully tested for low-Earth orbit applications, navigation control, and Solar System exploration. The main handicap is the low thrust generated by radiation pressure. The solution?, designing sails with very low density but still with high Young’s modulus, high tensile strength and highly stretchable. Does this ring a bell? yes, it is graphene again.

The multinational GrapheneX team (Santiago J. Cartamil, Rocco Gaudenzi, Vera A. E. C. Janssen and Davide Stefani) won the ‘Drop your Thesis 2017’ competition. This means, this November, they will start to make experiments on microgravity at the Bremen Drop Tower.

On a minor note, they asked Scixel to design the logo and here it is. And if everything goes as expected, there is more funny stuff to come. So stay tuned.

Hydrophobicity on rare earth oxides: the bare truth

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For some time, rare earth oxides have been thought to be water-repellent. This march, scientists from the University of Basel, the Swiss Nanoscience Institute and the Paul Scherrer Institute, have found the real origin of this behaviour. They’ve shown that rare earth oxides do not present any significant hydrophobicity. Only when exposed to environmental conditions, they repel water. The explanation, it was only chemical reactions with gaseous hydrocarbons found in the ambient air that increased the surfaces’ roughness and reduced wetting by water.

Personally interested in the subject, we did this picture for them, advised by Dr. Laurent Marot.

2016 Scixel’s Overview

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Finally we’ve found some time to produce our 2016 demoreel. It’s been a great year. We’ve worked with a lot of new people in Spain and abroad. Lots of amazing projects both artistically and scientifically. These are some of them:

This is a way of both showing off about the people we’ve worked with and expressing some gratitude. It is difficult not to feel lucky.

On charging your phone with your jumper

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Imagine having your your battery charger printed on your clothes or on the screen of your cellphone… this is what Organic Nanostructured Photovoltaics group, at ICFO is proposing. The use of organic electronics allows the production of  flexible cells which happen to be highly inefficient. By layering nanoparticles in a clever way, they’ve been able to increase the performance of these devices, thus solving the problem.

With the help of Dr. Silvia Colodrero, we created this picture which made it to the cover of Advanced Functional Materials.

News from the other side

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While preparing the 2016 demoreel, I’ve just found two covers I did during last year I was totally unaware of… This seems to be alive beyond my control.

Widefield Lensless Endoscopy via Speckle Correlations

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If you want to know about cool stuff going on in the optics field, check out the Advanced Imaging Lab, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Now they’ve come up with a way to make Widefield Lensless Endoscopy via Speckle Correlations. In short, this means smaller devices and better quality images by using speckle correlations in multicore fibers.

To illustrate it, and requested by Dr. Ori Katz  we did this image for them. It made it to the inside cover of OPN.

Working with them gets you in a state of something in between astonishment and “… you sure this is really possible???”. Like that time in 2014, when they claimed they were able to recover images through scattering layers and around corners. Well, it happened to be so true, it was published in Nature Photonics.

Phonometa’s new website

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We’ve just finished the new Phonometa’s website, a research group that explores a not so common area of condensed matter physics:  physical acoustics, elasticity, and vibrating engineered fluids or solids.

Phonometa’s head, Johan Christensen, has just arrived from Denmark to establish his group at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Interesting stuff is going to come out of this.

Quantized thermal transport: this is big

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For the first time, a solid proof of the quantized nature of thermal transport in single atom junctions. That’s it.

While quantized electrical conductance was pretty well known and proof for quite a while, quantized thermal transport observation was still slipping away from researchers eyes. Until now.

A group of researchers from Michigan University, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and Universität Konstanz have managed to reach the amazing levels of accuracy and stability this measurement requires.

This changes the game. And we had the opportunity to make this explanatory video for them with the help of Prof. J. C. Cuevas (UAM) and Longji Cui (UMICH). One of those times when your job pays off.

Where to research?

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Here we present the IFT (Instituto de física teórica). Filmociencia has directed this beautiful video to present this research institute and the amazing environment they offer to students and researchers.

We have collaborated with them performing a small presentation effect.