Seminars

Strong presentation skills are a key to success for engineers, scientists, and others, yetmany speakers are at a loss to tackle the task. Systematic as they otherwise can be in their work, they go at it intuitively or haphazardly, with much good will but seldom good results.

(note the slightly later time of this seminar) An electron in a solid has three attributes: charge, spin, and orbital. The orbital represents the shape of the electron cloud in a solid. In magnetic metal oxides with anisotropic-shaped d-orbitals not only the Coulomb interactions are of importance, but also the quantum exchange energy is crucial for understanding their properties.

The light-driven water splitting reaction to generate molecular hydrogen and oxygen is one of the most promising processes for producing clean fuels. In the approach we are following we attempt to construct a photoelectrochemical (PEC) cell based on molecular components.

Many layered materials can be mechanically exfoliated to atomically thin sheets, the most famous being graphene. This opens the possibility to stack different layer types together to form materials with novel properties: van der Waals (vdW) systems. The extent to which vdW systemsdiffer from the mother materials is governed by the interaction between the different layers.

Biomass treatment by atmospheric pressure plasmas to enable the production of bioethanol is a big issue today. Discharges favor the degradation of lignin because it creates efficiently reactive species that interact strongly with the biomass. A surface wave discharge (SWD) in argon at atmospheric-pressure generated by a Surfatron device was studied by optical emission and mass spectrometries.