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.