New Publications

The conversion of CO₂ into e-fuels by light offers a sustainable solution to close the carbon cycle. Researchers at the Laboratory for Nanometallurgy have pioneered an innovative approach to plasmon-assisted catalytic CO₂ conversion using nanoscale disordered network metamaterials.

Researchers of the Laboratory for Mesoscopic Systems with colleagues at the Paul Scherrer Institute, the University of Oxford and the Max Plank Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids have developed a pioneering X-ray technique to probe the 3D orientation of a material’s building blocks at the nanoscale. The technique allows the visualization of crystal grains, grain boundaries and defects - critical factors that govern material performance.

Research team led by the Laboratory for Soft Materials and Interfaces have created microcapsule arrays that can simultaneously record the different history of stress levels by changing color. This technology enables monitoring microscale damage and pressure in materials.

Researchers at the Laboratory for Nanometallurgy have developed a new fabrication method for non-primitive metasurfaces. Thereby the colors of these metasurfaces represent and visualizes light-matter interactions.

Light is an effective tool to probe the polarization and domain distribution in ferroelectric materials non-invasively. With the emergence of oxide electronics, there is now a strong demand to expand the role of light toward active control of the polarization. A research team led by Prof. Trassin and Prof. Fiebig at the ETH Zurich in the DMATL demonstrated the optical control of the ferroelectric polarization in prototypical epitaxial heterostructures.

The Laboratory of Polymeric Materials presents a new method of initiating and accelerating radical polymerizations.

The Laboratory of Polymeric Materials presents the photocatalytic depolymerization of polymers synthesized by ATRP.

Researchers from the Laboratory for Nanometallurgy developed an approach that utilizes two self-assembly processes in series to build an optical metamaterial with two distinct functional components: a disordered network and spherical nanoparticles.

Material surfaces encompass structural and chemical discontinuities that often lead to the loss of the property of interest in so-called dead layers. It is problematic in nanoscale oxide electronics, as it results in a thickness threshold required for the emergence of the materials functionality. An international team, led by Professors M. Trassin and M. Fiebig at D-MATL, reports a groundbreaking achievement: the stabilization of ultrathin ferroelectricity, right from the very first unit cell.