news 2018

UAntwerp researchers from the CMT group, Dr. Mehmet Yagmurcukardes and Prof. Francois Peeters, in collaboration with a team from Manchester have uncovered novel 2D materials. (Nanowerk News) A team of researchers at the National Graphene Institute at The University of Manchester have developed a new method to synthesize 2D materials that are thought to be impossible or, at least, unobtainable by current technologies.

UAntwerp researchers from the CMT group, Dr Jonas Bekaert and Prof Milorad Milosevic, in collaboration with Swedish researchers have predicted that a atomically thin layer of hydrogen will boost the critical temperature of a thin superconductor to above a hundred kelvin. Hydrogen-rich bulk superconducting materials have recently exhibited record-breaking critical temperatures, nearing the ambient temperature and thereby promising a major technological impact on the society.

Belgian research groups from the UCLouvain and WELBIO, VIB and Ghent University, and the biotechnology company argenx elucidated the three-dimensional structure of an assembly of proteins operating on cells that dampen immune responses. They also discovered how an antibody can block this assembly and the immunosuppression it induces downstream.

Clusters of silver atoms captured in zeolites, a porous material with small channels and voids, have remarkable light emitting properties. For instance, they can be used for more efficient lighting applications as a substitute for LED and TL lamps. Until recently, scientists did not know exactly how and why these small particles emit light.

Researchers have achieved a long-sought-after objective of electrically controlling water flow through membranes, as reported in Nature. This is the latest exciting membranes development benfitting from the unique properties of graphene. The new research opens up an avenue for developing smart membrane technologies and could revolutionise the field of artificial biological systems, tissue engineering and filtration.

Ghost particle originates from supermassive black hole An international team of scientists has found the first evidence of a source of high-energy cosmic neutrinos. The measured neutrino originates from a supermassive black hole. Researchers from VUB are among those behind the sensational finding.

Inleiding: Mystifying results in excitonic Coulomb drag experiments obtained independently by two research groups in the USA explained by the CMT group (M. Zarenia, D. Neilson and F. Peeters) in a recent Physical Review Letters paper. Taking a multiband approach explains 'electron-hole reverse drag' and exciton formation Mystifying experimental results obtained independently by two research groups in the USA seemed to show coupled holes and electrons moving in the opposite direction to theory.

Chemists from Belgium and China have produced a new material that changes colour under a flow of human breath. After a while, the colour returns to normal. This creates possibilities for encryption and anti-counterfeiting. Our clothes, food and everyday devices get their colour from dye or pigments that absorb light.

Introduction: Vincent Van Gogh used only two yellows to paint Sunflowers: a light-fast and a light-sensitive type. Researchers from the Universities of Antwerp, Perugia and Delft together with museum staff have painstakingly examined Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam). He painted this iconic work, a composition dominated by yellow tints with some orange and blue accents, in 1889 in Arles, France.

Stephen Hawking's last paper, co-authored by Thomas Hertog, does away with the infinite multiverse and predicts a simpler and finite universe. Find out more in this ERC interview with Thomas Hertog. You put forward a new theory of the origin of the universe. What's wrong with the current one? "The prevailing theory of the Big Bang is called eternal inflation.

An assistant professor at Brussels' Vrije Universiteit and a visiting professor at Harvard, Vincent Ginis is a brilliant scientist who won a Solvay Award in 2014 and was designated as one of the top 50 tech pioneers in Belgium in 2017. His particular area of study is optics, but he makes a strong case for the combination of different scientific disciplines, or "languages", to drive progress in research.

Researchers at the NANOCHEM laboratory (MolSys Research Unit) of the University of Liege have studied molecules synthesized by Sir Fraser Stoddart's group, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry 2016 and professor at Northwestern University. The results obtained during this research and published in Nature Nanotechnology (1) open up new paths in the use of molecular machines, these synthetic molecules that carry out controlled motion on demand.

Could the manufacture of the integrated circuits and chips for our everyday electronic devices be made simpler, safer and cheaper simply by being able to switch coloured light on and off? Researchers from Queensland University of Technology (QUT, Australia), Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Belgium's Ghent University have stepped towards this  by pioneering a system that modulates visible, coloured light to change the reactions of a powerful chemical coupling agent.