2019

ETH researchers are making chocolates shimmer in rainbow colours without the addition of colourants. They have found a way to imprint a special structure on the surface of the chocolate to create a targeted colour effect.

The inaugural lecture of Prof. Athina Anastasaki is now available online.

Congratulations to Prof. Lucio Isa, this year’s winner of the Golden Owl at the D-MATL. Lucio Isa, head of the Soft Materials and Interfaces group, has been receiving outstanding student feedback for his teaching on the Master’s level since many years.

We are very proud to announce that Tobias Esswein, PhD student of the Materials Theory group, has been awarded the IBM Research Forschungspreis for his excellent Master Thesis "Exploring Ferroelectric Quantum Criticality and Superconductivity in KTaO₃".

At this year’s Master’s degree graduation ceremony 26 graduates received their diploma. We congratulate all the graduates and wish them the best for their future career! In addition, the following four students were awarded with prizes for their outstanding achievements.

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI and ETH Zurich have developed a micromachine that can perform different actions. First nanomagnets in the components of the microrobots are magnetically programmed and then the various movements are controlled by magnetic fields. Such machines, which are only a few tens of micrometres across, could be used, for example, in the human body to perform small operations.

We are very pleased with the news that the outstanding master thesis "Exploring Twin Boundaries and Superconductivity in WO₃" of Noé Mascello is being awarded with the ETH medal.

The phenomenon of age-hardening in metals was discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century. 110 years later, a research collaboration between the Montanuniversität Leoben and the ETH Zurich Laboratory of Metal Physics and Technology has revealed that this effect depends strongly on material dimensions. The results are presented in Nature Communications.

A research collaboration between the Laboratory for Multifunctional Ferroic Materials (ETH Zurich) and the Satoh Lab (Tokyo Institute of Technology) tracks the “invisible” magnetism in an antiferromagnetic material on the move. Understanding the dynamics of antiferromagnets is crucial for the development of electronic devices that are orders of magnitude faster than the existing ones.

In episode 13 of the ETH-Podcast Jennifer Khakshouri talks to Nicola Spaldin, head of the Materials Theory group, about her sparking energy and motivation to teach and research and listen to her play the clarinet with her chamber music ensemble.

A solid‐state lithium‐ion battery, in which all components (current collector, anode and cathode, electrolyte, and packaging) are stretchable, is being developed by researcher of the Laboratory for Multifunctional Materials group, giving rise to a battery design with mechanical properties that are compliant with flexible electronic devices and elastic wearable systems.

In a recent Advanced Materials publication, researchers at the Laboratory of Metal Physics and Technology (LMPT) present TEM experiments designed to follow the active nano-corrosion processes of biodegradable Mg alloys over periods ranging from seconds to days. They find that cathodically polarized dealloying of intermetallic nanoprecipitates governs their electrochemical reactivity. This presents a fundamentally new concept for active materials such as Mg alloys.

Nicola Spaldin, head of Materials Theory group, has been awarded the Swiss Science Prize Marcel Benoist for her outstanding research into multiferroic materials. Her work has laid the foundations for new ultrafast and energy-efficient data storage technologies.

With the help of a 3D printed salt template, researchers of the Laboratory of Metal Physics and Technology and the Complex Materials group have succeeded in producing magnesium scaffolds with structured porosity that are suitable for bioresorbable bone implants.

Professor Nicholas D. Spencer is the latest winner of the Tribology Gold Medal, which will be awarded to him in November at a special ceremony in the British Embassy in Berne.

In a recent Adv. Mater. publication, researchers at the Laboratory of Metal Physics and Technology (LMPT) and Complex Materials have documented the creation of ordered porous Mg scaffolds via 3D NaCl printing (and sintering), Mg melt infiltration, and subsequent salt removal by leaching. These set the premise for a unique combination of tunable mechanical properties and the potential of being deployed as biodegradable implant, as the scaffold can be tuned to predictably biodegrade in the human body.

By engineering the microstructure of a glass composite, researchers from the Complex Materials group in D-MATL have designed the first transparent platelet-reinforced composite that combines high strength with slow and stable crack propagation.

Researchers from the group of Polymeric Materials in D-MATL have developed a simple methodology to tune the dispersity of polymers without compromising the end-group fidelity of the resulting materials. Both the number average (Mn) and the weight average (Mw) distribution can be efficiently controlled, thus paving the way for applications in both academia and industry.

The 14th edition of the MaP Graduate Symposium took place on 03 July 2019 at ETH Zentrum. The Department of Materials was very successfully represented this year with various high-class talks and poster presentations. It is therefore not surprising that many of the awards were given to members of the D-MATL.

A high-end milling machine goes into operation on Tuesday 18th, 2019 — for the benefit of the Department and of ETH as a whole.