Fondant under the magnifying glass

New insights into the properties of sweet coating: The results could be used to optimize the industrial production process in the future

04-Sep-2023 - For many, the german sweet "Amerikaner" - a pastry with a sweet, whitish coating - is a childhood memory at the bakery. But there's a lot of physics and chemistry in the frosting. A team led by Thomas Vilgis at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, together with colleagues from the ...

New insights into the utilization of nanotechnology-based drugs

How nanoparticles get inside cells and release drugs

24-Jan-2023 - Novel drugs, such as vaccines against covid-19, among others, are based on drug transport using nanoparticles. Whether this drug transport is negatively influenced by an accumulation of blood proteins on the nanoparticle’s surface was not clarified for a long time. Scientists at the Max Planck ...

With light into the nanoworld: How optical microscopes allow detailed investigations of nanoparticles

The goal: the development of novel nanoparticles for biomedical applications.

21-Dec-2022 - It sounds like trying to scan a vinyl record with a hammer: Light is actually too "coarse" to image small particles on the nanometer scale. However, in their project "Supercol"- funded by the European Union - scientists want to achieve just that: The investigation of nanoparticles with light. To ...

Golden wedding for molecules

Opportunities for a "new" chemistry

20-Apr-2022 - Chemical syntheses in liquids and gases take place in three-dimensional space. Random collisions between molecules have to result in something new in an extremely short time. But there is another way: on a gold surface under ultrahigh vacuum conditions, molecules lying still next to each other ...

The Missing Step in the Water Warmup: First Bend and then Turn

New insights into how and how quickly the energy stored in a bent water molecule is dissipated into heat

11-Dec-2020 - The water on Earth makes our planet inhabitable. It absorbs the Sun’s energy and releases it in the form of heat. An international research collaboration headed by the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) has now shown how and how fast the stored energy in the water molecules is ...

How graphene nanoparticles improve the resolution of microscopes

Small particles, big effects

22-Nov-2019 - Conventional light microscopes cannot distinguish structures when they are separated by a distance smaller than, roughly, the wavelength of light. Superresolution microscopy, developed since the 1980s, lifts this limitation, using fluorescent moieties. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for ...

What happens in a solar cell when the lights go out?

27-Jul-2018 - What happens in a solar cell when the lights go out depends heavily on the material being used. In conventional silicon solar cells the answer is quite simple: the electrical current produced by the cell immediately goes to zero. It is different in so-called perovskite solar cells where the cell ...

The structural memory of water persists on a picosecond timescale

Long-lived sub-structures exist in liquid water as discovered using novel ultrafast vibrational spectroscopies

22-Sep-2015 - A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) in Mainz, Germany and FOM Institute AMOLF in the Netherlands have characterized the local structural dynamics of liquid water, i.e. how quickly water molecules change their binding state. Using innovative ultrafast ...

Empa researchers clarify reaction pathway to fabricate graphene-like materials

11-Nov-2010 - Graphene is a promising material for tomorrow’s nanoelectronics devices. Precise and upscaleable methods to fabricate graphene and derived materials with desired electronic properties are however still searched after. To overcome the current limitations, Empa researchers have fabricated ...

Nanoribbons for graphene transistors

Materials for tomorrow's nanoelectronics

23-Jul-2010 - In the recent issue of Nature, scientists from Empa and the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research report how they have managed for the first time to grow graphene ribbons that are just a few nanometres wide using a simple surface-based chemical method. Graphene ribbons are considered to be ...