Gold membrane coaxes secrets out of surfaces

Thousand-fold signal amplification

26-Jun-2024 - Using a special wafer-thin gold membrane, ETH researchers have made it significantly easier to study surfaces. The membrane makes it possible to measure properties of surfaces that are inaccessible to conventional methods. “Surfaces were invented by the devil” - this quote is attributed to the ...

New corrosion protection that repairs itself

An extraordinary corrosion protection was created from a chance find: It glows in places where it is not damaged, repairs itself – and can be reused multiple times

22-Feb-2023 - Skyscrapers, bridges, ships, aeroplanes, cars – everything humans make or build sooner or later decays. The ravages of time are known as corrosion; nothing is safe from it. This makes the fight against corrosion expensive. All countries together invest around 3.5 percent of annual global gross ...

ETH Zurich researchers want to make salt printing marketable

They have also come up with a name for their start-up: “Sallea”, a portmanteau of “salt leaching”.

06-Oct-2022 - Materials scientists Nicole Kleger and Simona Fehlmann have developed a 3D printing process for creating salt templates that they can fill with other materials. One area of application is the creation of highly porous lightweight metal components. The two Pioneer Fellows are now trying to ...

Breaking down plastic into its constituent parts

First step towards genuine plastic recycling

25-Mar-2022 - A team of ETH researchers led by Athina Anastasaki have succeeded in breaking down plastic into its molecular building blocks and in recovering over 90 percent of them. A first step towards genuine plastic recycling. The chemical industry has a long tradition of producing polymers. This involves ...

Changes in colour indicate deformations

Fluorescence indicates overstressed parts

24-Aug-2021 - ETH Zurich researchers have developed a new type of laminate that changes colour as soon as the material is deformed. This way, the materials researchers can kill two birds with one stone: a lightweight composite material that inspects itself. Lightweight construction has found its way into many ...

Shiny mega-crystals that build themselves

New mega-crystals exhibit unique properties such as superfluorescence and may well usher in a new era in materials science

28-May-2021 - An international team led by Empa and ETH Zurich researchers is playing with shape-engineered nanoscale building blocks that are up to 100-times larger than atoms and ions. And although these nano "Lego bricks" interact with each other with forces vastly different and much weaker than those ...

"Simulation microscope" examines transistors of the future

"We have created one of the largest databases of transistor materials"

12-Aug-2020 - Since the discovery of graphene, two-​dimensional materials have been the focus of materials research. Among other things, they could be used to build tiny, high-​performance transistors. Researchers at ETH Zurich and EPF Lausanne have now simulated and evaluated one hundred possible materials ...

A material with a particular twist

Surprising discoveries regarding the behaviour of electrons

28-Apr-2020 - In a material made of two thin crystal layers that are slightly twisted with respect to each other, researchers at ETH have studied the behaviour of strongly interacting electrons. Doing so, they found a number of surprising properties. Many modern technologies are based on special materials, ...

Printing complex cellulose-based objects

27-Mar-2020 - Researchers from ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) have set a new world record: they 3D printed complex objects with higher cellulose content than that of any other additively manufactured cellulose-​based parts. To achieve this, they used a ...

The power inside

20-Dec-2019 - Metamaterials defy conventions, making rigid media flexible, soft materials transmit signals, and sound and light behave in bizarre ways. Metamaterials are engineered to possess properties not found in nature. The ceramic cube under the microscope is gifted with superpowers. Compressed to nearly ...