Watching energy materials as they form

Eyes glued to a live transmission from inside a reaction vessel, researchers watch chemical reactions at work

20-Jun-2024 - Shooting a movie in the lab requires special equipment. Especially when the actors are molecules – invisible to the naked eye – reacting with each other. “Imagine trying to film tiny lava flows during a volcanic eruption. Your smartphone camera wouldn’t be up to the job. First, you’d need to ...

MXenes for energy storage: Chemical imaging more than just surface deep

19-Jun-2024 - A new method in spectromicroscopy significantly improves the study of chemical reactions at the nanoscale, both on surfaces and inside layered materials. Scanning X-ray microscopy (SXM) at MAXYMUS beamline of BESSY II enables the investigation of chemical species adsorbed on the top layer ...

Barcodes expand range of high-resolution sensor

Optical barcodes for multimode sensing have potential applications in biomedical diagnostics, environmental monitoring, chemical sensing and more

01-May-2024 - The same geometric quirk that lets visitors murmur messages around the circular dome of the whispering gallery at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London or across St. Louis Union Station’s whispering arch also enables the construction of high-resolution optical sensors. Whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) ...

Novel UV Broadband Spectrometer Revolutionises Air Pollutant Analysis

The laser-based technology developed at TU Graz enables the continual real-time analysis of air pollutants and their interaction with other gases and sunlight

11-Apr-2024 - Sunlight has a major influence on chemical processes. Its high-energy UV radiation in particular is strongly absorbed by all materials and triggers photochemical reactions of the substances present in the air. A well-known example is the formation of ground-level ozone when UV light hits nitrogen ...

Two conductors of a chemical reaction

Watching the reaction live

22-Nov-2023 - For the first time, researchers at TU Wien have successfully observed the operating principle of so-called promoters in a catalytic reaction in real-time. These promoters play an important role in technology, but so far there is only limited understanding of how they work. Catalysts are essential ...

Scientists use quantum device to slow down simulated chemical reaction 100 billion times

What happens in femtoseconds in nature can now be observed in milliseconds in the lab

31-Aug-2023 - Scientists at the University of Sydney have, for the first time, used a quantum computer to engineer and directly observe a process critical in chemical reactions by slowing it down by a factor of 100 billion times. Joint lead researcher and PhD student, Vanessa Olaya Agudelo, said: “It is by ...

Nega­tively charged and yet pretty cold

This enables, for example, new investigations of chemical reactions in space

06-Jul-2023 - Anions, negatively charged ions, are reluctant to be cooled. Physicists led by Matthias Weidemüller from Heidelberg University and Roland Wester from the University of Innsbruck have now developed a method for cooling molecular anions to below 3 Kelvin in a remarkably short time. This enables, ...

Virtual exploration of chemical reactions

A new online platform for exploring computationally calculated chemical pathways, enabling in-depth understanding and design of chemical reactions

05-Jul-2023 - Advances in computational chemistry have proven a great boon in the field of reaction design, leading to the discovery of new reaction pathways for the synthesis of high-value compounds. Computational chemistry generates much data, and the process of organizing and visualizing this data is vital ...

More complex than expected: Catalysis under the microscope

Chemical analysis on the microscopic scale has shown that the catalyst composition can vary locally even more than expected

08-Jun-2023 - At TU Wien (Vienna), scientists use microscopy techniques to observe chemical reactions on catalysts more precisely than before yielding a wealth of detail. This made clear why some effects cannot be predicted. Catalysts composed from tiny metal particles play an important role in many areas of ...

Nanofluidic devices offer solutions for studying single molecule chemical reactions

"Nanofluidic devices have the potential to become a fantastic experimental tool to elucidate the dynamics of solution reactions"

23-Feb-2023 - In a chemical reaction, molecules in different substances meet one another to form new molecules causing changes in the bonds of their atoms. The molecules collide at an extremely close distance—a nanometer or less—in an extremely short amount of time. This makes investigating the details of ...