2018

In a collaboration between the Laboratory for Multifunctional Ferroic Materials (Manfred Fiebig, ETH Zurich) the Laboratory for Mesoscopic Systems (Laura Heyderman, ETH Zurich, PSI) and the Condensed Matter Theory Group (Peter Derlet, PSI), an exotic new type of magnetic order has been designed and controlled.

Powerful guidelines for the design of lightweight composite materials inspired by the structure of strong and tough biological nacre are highlighted in a new paper from the Complex Materials Group.

Three researchers from the ETH Domain, including professor Nicola Spaldin, head of the Materials Theory group, and a scientist from Stockholm University have received an ERC Synergy Grant of EUR 13.9 million.

The ETH Zurich’s student association (VSETH) has selected Pietro Gambardella, head of Magnetism and Interface Physics, as a recipient of the "Goldene Eule".

Researchers from the Soft Materials group are developing a method with which they can coat the droplets with controlled interfacial composition and coverage on demand in an emulsion in order to stabilise them. In doing so they are fulfilling a long-held dream of researchers and industry.

Nicola Spaldin, head of the Materials Theory group, explained Multiferroika and why they are urgently needed in the computer age on 08.11.2018 at the Falling Walls Conference in Berlin.

The engineering of non-destructive, low footprint optical sensors has attracted significant interest in research in recent years. Such devices can enable real-time and spatiotemporal tracking of materials properties even in secluded applications, such as offshore wind turbines, or extreme environments, as found in thermal solar collectors.

The Department of Materials is happy to announce that the Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology has appointed André Studart (*1974), currently Accociate Professor, as Full Professor of Complex Materials.

Jacob Israelachvili, Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Honorary Doctor of D-MATL, passed away at his home in California on 20th September 2018 after a lengthy illness.

In its role as a pioneering institution, the ETH Zurich aims to try new approaches, broaden horizons, develop new perspectives and thus play its part in ensuring that our country will be able to hold its own on the global stage – and not just in the short term. The Department of Materials is an active part of the future and has contributed or is part of three projects: SynMatLab: Laboratory for Multiscale Materials Synthesis, Materials for Robotics and RobotX: Center for intelligent Machines  

Fused deposition modeling (FDM), often simply referred to as 3D Printing, has been hailed as the future of manufacturing. Researchers at ETH Zürich have developed a bioinspired approach to 3D print recyclable materials using cheap desktop printers that outperform state-of-the-art printed polymers and rival the highest performance lightweight materials. This will finally enable the manufacturing of complex parts that mimic natural structural designs on the mass market.

In a recent Phys. Rev. Lett. article, researchers at the Laboratory of Metal Physics and Technology (LMPT) have demonstrated that magnetization switching in ferromagnetic nanoparticles is linked to the dynamics of topological point defects, which form as Skyrmion lines and break via the creation of emergent magnetic monopoles. These move at speeds exceeding those of any other magnetic object known, and thus generate unprecedented solenoidal electric fields of several megavolts per meter.  

In August 2018, Claire Donnelly was awarded the SPS Award in Computational Physics, sponsored by COMSOL, and the Werner Meyer-Ilse Memorial Award. We congratulate her on these awards as well as for two awards earlier on in the year: the ETH Medal for an outstanding doctoral thesis and the American Physical Society Richard L. Greene Dissertation Award, recognizing doctoral thesis research of exceptional quality and importance.

Multiferoics are materials known for their coupled magnetic and electric properties ― but they have much more to offer!

In a recent PNAS publication, researchers at the Laboratory of Metal Physics and Technology (LMPT) have demonstrated that crystal nucleation from the melt may generally occur via an intermediate nucleation of metastable quasicrystals. This transition path was observed with a newly developed method of “up-quenching”, which can yield the discovery of hidden transient phases that are key to understanding the nucleation and crystallization behavior in metallic, polymeric and biological systems.

A collaboration on experiments headed by the Laboratory of Multifunctional Ferroic Materials (Manfred Fiebig) shows that certain materials emit optical echo pulses that reveal direct information about the quantum-mechanical nature of these systems.

A research team led by Dr. Edmondo M. Benetti (Polymer Surfaces Group) and Prof. Richard Hoogenboom (Ghent University) carried out a comprehensive, comparative analysis of the structural and physicochemical properties by non-ionic polymer “brush” surfaces that are aiming to replace poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) in the functionalization of  exposed surface of biomaterials.

The 13th edition of the MaP Graduate Symposium took place on 26 June 2018 at ETH Hönggerberg. Over 220 participants joined the symposium to discuss the latest achievements of early-career researchers in Materials and Processes from ETH Zurich, PSI and EMPA. Researchers of our Department were among the finalists and price winners.

Prof. Nicholas Spencer was named Fellow of the (US) Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers, for his significant impact on the field of tribology and lubrication engineering.

At the 2018 Nagoya meeting, Dieter Schlüter was awarded the International Award 2017 of the Society of Polymer Science Japan for his "Pioneering Studies of 1D Nanoobject Polymers and the Discovery of Synthetic 2D Polymers".