A breakthrough discovery paves the way for new electronics with chiral materials

Orbital angular momentum monopoles could revolutionize future information technology

01-Oct-2024 - Orbital angular momentum monopoles, which have been predicted to offer significant advantages for next generation of electronic devices, have now been observed for the first time in chiral materials by scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle and their ...

Significant Breakthrough in Understanding of the Two-State Reactivity Mechanism

Scientists discovered first experimental methodology for measuring low-energy, spin-forbidden transitions in molecular catalysts

02-Jul-2024 - Iron-based catalysts are essential in various fields, including medicine, energy, and environmental science. They facilitate reactions that are vital for producing pharmaceuticals, clean fuels, and breaking down pollutants. These catalysts operate by enabling the directed transformation of ...

High entropy alloys: structural disorder and magnetic properties

"High-entropy alloys are an extremely diverse and exciting class of materials”

26-Oct-2022 - High-entropy alloys (HEAs) are promising materials for catalysis and energy storage, and at the same time they are extremely hard, heat resistant and demonstrate great variability in their magnetic behaviour. Now, a team at BESSY II in collaboration with Ruhr University Bochum, BAM, Freie ...

Tracking chirality in real time

“These ground-breaking experiments show that time-resolved circular dichroism is uniquely suited to capture the molecular motion that drives many (bio)chemical processes”

01-Jun-2022 - Scientists at EPFL have developed a new laser-based technique that can measure ultrafast changes in the structural symmetry of molecules, called chirality, tracking their conformational shifts in real time. In a collaboration with researchers from the Universities of Geneva and Pisa, the ...

Belgian Chemist Receives 2022 Heinrich Emanuel Merck Award for Analytical Science

The groundbreaking aspect of her work centers on making circular dichroism ion spectroscopy feasible for large biomolecule ions

21-Apr-2022 - Merck, a leading science and technology company, today presented Dr. Valérie Gabelica (44), Inserm, and Director of IECB, Pessac, France, with the 2022 Heinrich Emanuel Merck Award for Analytical Science. The award ceremony took place during the analytical conference EuroFAST2022, Nijmegen, the ...

Snapshot measurement of single nanostructure’s circular dichroism

29-Mar-2022 - The 3D conformation of a molecule or nanostructure determines its function. For instance, a left-handed amino acid can be beneficialtohealth, while its right-handed compartment can be toxic. With today’s optical imaging techniques, one can accurately locate a molecule or a nanostructure, but ...

Overcoming False Optical Activity

Interference leads to inaccurate Raman spectroscopic analysis of vitamin B12

25-Aug-2021 - Many natural products are complicated organic molecules. Despite this complexity, scientists are usually able to investigate them using spectroscopic techniques. However, a team of researchers has now discovered that care should be taken using Raman spectroscopy to analyze certain chiral ...

A novel method to monitor molecular aggregation

16-Jan-2019 - Chiral molecules are defined as molecules that are non-superimposable on their mirror image, much like that of left and right human hand bone structure. There are many examples of chiral molecules in nature, including proteins and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The dynamic processes of these chiral ...

Chirality in 'real-time'

Circular dichroism in the deep ultraviolet

11-Jan-2019 - In nature, certain molecules with the same chemical composition, can exist in two different shapes that are mirrors images of each other, much like our hands. This property is known as "chirality" and molecules with different chirality are called enantiomers. Enantiomers can exhibit entirely ...