Publications related to Ultrafast generation and control of an electron vortex beam via chiral plasmonic near fields

Exciton migration in two-dimensional materials

Excitons play an essential role in the optical response of two-dimensional materials. These are bound states showing up in the band gaps of many-body systems and are conceived as quasiparticles formed by an electron and a hole. By performing real-time simu ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Osmosis-driven stiffening of structured hydrogels

Esther Amstad, Ran Zhao, Alexandra Thoma

Plant cells harness osmotic pressures to stiffen their leaves through strong turgor pressures. Key to this osmosisdriven stiffening is the confinement of liquids within semipermeable membranes that can regulate the transport of water molecules and ions. In ...

Elsevier2024

Near-Room-Temperature Detection of Aromatic Compounds with Inkjet-Printed Plasticized Polymer Composites

Thomas Maeder, Jürgen Brugger, Mohammadmahdi Kiaee

Chemiresistive gas sensors composed of a thermoplastic polymer matrix and conductive fillers offer various advantages for detecting volatile organic compounds (VOCs), including low power consumption due to near-room-temperature operation, high sensitivity, ...

Amer Chemical Soc2024

Measuring electrical properties in semiconductor devices by pixelated STEM and off-axis electron holography (or convergent beams vs. plane waves)

Victor Carle Adrien Boureau

We demonstrate the use of both pixelated differential phase contrast (DPC) scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) and off-axis electron holography (EH) for the measurement of electric fields and assess the advantages and limitations of each techn ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2024

Electron-beam based nanoscale quantum controls

Hoda Shirzad

Advancing quantum technologies depends on the precise control of individual quantum systems, the so-called qubits, and the exploitation of their quantum properties. Nowadays, expanding the number of qubits to be entangled is at the core of the developments ...

EPFL2024

Monitoring an Emergent Pathogen at Low Incidence in Wastewater Using qPCR: Mpox in Switzerland

Tamar Kohn, Timothy R. Julian

Wastewater-based epidemiology offers a complementary approach to clinical case-based surveillance of emergent diseases and can help identify regions with infected people to prioritize clinical surveillance strategies. However, tracking emergent diseases in ...

2024

Room-Temperature Quantum Optomechanics and Free-Electron Quantum Optics

Guanhao Huang

Quantum optics studies how photons interact with other forms of matter, the understanding of which was crucial for the development of quantum mechanics as a whole. Starting from the photoelectric effect, the quantum property of light has led to the develop ...

EPFL2024

Verification of the Fourier-enhanced 3D finite element Poisson solver of the gyrokinetic full-f code PICLS

Stephan Brunner, Laurent Villard, Alberto Bottino, Moahan Murugappan

We introduce and derive the Fourier -enhanced 3D electrostatic field solver of the gyrokinetic full -f PIC code PICLS. The solver makes use of a Fourier representation in one periodic direction of the domain to make the solving of the system easily paralle ...

Elsevier2024

Polydopamine-coated photoautotrophic bacteria for improving extracellular electron transfer in living photovoltaics

Fabian Fischer, Ardemis Anoush Boghossian, Charlotte Elisabeth Marie Roullier, Melania Reggente, Mohammed Mouhib, Patricia Brandl, Hanxuan Wang

Living photovoltaics are microbial electrochemical devices that use whole cell–electrode interactions to convert solar energy to electricity. The bottleneck in these technologies is the limited electron transfer between the microbe and the electrode surfac ...

2024

Microsecond Time-Resolved Cryo-Electron Microscopy

Oliver Florian Harder

Recently, single-particle cryo-electron microscopy emerged as a technique capable of determining protein structures at near-atomic resolution and resolving protein dynamics with a temporal resolution ranging from second to milliseconds. This thesis describ ...

EPFL2024

Evaluation of Interface and Residual Strain of NiTi Layer Deposited on NiTiX Substrate by Laser Powder Bed Fusion

Elyas Ghafoori, Christian Leinenbach, Irene Ferretto, Mahbod Golrang, Mahshid Memarian

This study investigates the microstructure and properties of functionally graded NiTi alloy bilayers. The NiTi layer is printed by laser powder bed fusion on a NiTiX (where X is Hf or Cu) substrate prepared by vacuum arc remelting. Specimens produced with ...

Wiley-V C H Verlag Gmbh2024

Composition and Element Distribution Mapping of γ′ and γ" Phases of Inconel 718 by High-Resolution Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy and X-ray Energy-Dispersive Spectrometry

Philippe Buffat

The main strengthening mechanism for Inconel 718 (IN718), a Ni-based superalloy, is precipitation hardening by gamma ' and gamma '' particles. It is thus essential, for good alloy performance, that precipitates with the desired chemical composition have ad ...

MDPI2024

Structural study of nickelate based heterostructures

Jean-Marc Triscone, Duncan Thomas Lindsay Alexander, Bernat Mundet, Chih-Ying Hsu

Heterostructures consisting of SmNiO3 and NdNiO3 alternating layers with additional LaAlO3 spacer layers were grown and fully characterized by means of x-ray diffraction, atomic force microscopy, and scanning transmission electron microscopy. A change in t ...

Aip Publishing2024

Numerical Study of the Attosecond Free-Electron Laser Pulse Generation in the Soft X-ray Regime at the SwissFEL

Longdi Zhu

Isolated attosecond pulses from an X-ray free-electron laser are in high demand for attosecond science, which enables the probing of electron dynamics by X-ray nonlinear spectroscopy and single-particle imaging. The aim of this thesis is to simulate attos ...

EPFL2024

Nonlinear optical diode effect in a magnetic Weyl semimetal

Philip Johannes Walter Moll, Chunyu Guo, Hao Yang

Diode effects are of great interest for both fundamental physics and modern technologies. Electrical diode effects (nonreciprocal transport) have been observed in Weyl systems. Optical diode effects arising from the Weyl fermions have been theoretically co ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Quasi-operando Transmission Electron Microscopy Diagnostics for Electrocatalytic Processes in Liquids

Vasiliki Tileli

It is of great interest to the energy community to understand how the mechano-physico-chemical phenomena that eventually lead to device degradation are related to the startup, operation, and shutdown phases. For electrocatalytic systems operating in liquid ...

Swiss Chemical Soc2024

A continuous-wave and pulsed X-band electron spin resonance spectrometer operating in ultra-high vacuum for the study of low dimensional spin ensembles

Giovanni Boero, Fabio Donati, Soyoung Oh

We report the development of a continuous-wave and pulsed X-band electron spin resonance (ESR) spectrometer for the study of spins on ordered surfaces down to cryogenic temperatures. The spectrometer operates in ultra-high vacuum and utilizes a half-wavele ...

Aip Publishing2024

Dual-frame optimization for informationally complete quantum measurements

Ivano Tavernelli

Randomized measurement protocols such as classical shadows represent powerful resources for quantum technologies, with applications ranging from quantum state characterization and process tomography to machine learning and error mitigation. Recently, the n ...

2024

Exploring High-Performance and Energy-Efficient Architectures for Edge AI-Enabled Applications

Joshua Alexander Harrison Klein

The desire and ability to place AI-enabled applications on the edge has grown significantly in recent years. However, the compute-, area-, and power-constrained nature of edge devices are stressed by the needs of the AI-enabled applications, due to a gener ...

EPFL2024

Solution-based Cu+ transient species mediate the reconstruction of copper electrocatalysts for CO2 reduction

Raffaella Buonsanti, Anna Loiudice, Jan Vávra, Petru Pasquale Albertini, Gaétan Philippe Louis Ramona

Understanding metal surface reconstruction is of the utmost importance in electrocatalysis, as this phenomenon directly affects the nature of available active sites. However, its dynamic nature renders surface reconstruction notoriously difficult to study. ...

Nature Portfolio2024