news 2021

EPFL and the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) join forces to establish a new PSI research division: Scientific Computing, Theory, and Data. In collaboration with EPFL, the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) is officially expanding its own focus areas and establishing a new research division: Scientific Computing, Theory, and Data.

A collaboration between EPFL and UCSB has developed a long-anticipated breakthrough, and demonstrated CMOS technology - used for building microprocessors and memory chips - that allows wafer-scale manufacturing of chip-scale optical frequency combs. Optical frequency combs consist of light frequencies made of equidistant laser lines.

The electronic properties of graphene can be specifically modified by stretching the material evenly, say researchers at the University of Basel. These results open the door to the development of new types of electronic components. Graphene consists of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice.

Scientists have made an important discovery about the structure of barium titanate, a material used in everyday objects. Their findings refute existing theories on the displacement of the material's atoms. Barium titanate is a ferroelectric material used in nearly all electronic devices - computers, smartphones and even electric cars.

Chiara Gattinoni, a materials theorist and Marie Curie Fellow at ETH Zurich, uses the "Piz Daint" supercomputer at CSCS to investigate a special class of materials: ferroelectrics. In the future, these materials could constitute the heart of low-energy-consuming, miniaturised data storage in electrical devices.

PSI researchers have developed a new tomography method with which they can measure chemical properties inside catalyst materials in 3-D extremely precisely and faster than before. The application is equally important for science and industry. The researchers published their results today in the journal Science Advances .

The future quantum computers should be capable of super-fast and reliable computation. Today, this is still a major challenge. Now, computer scientists led by ETH Zurich conduct an early exploration for reliable quantum machine learning. Anyone who collects mushrooms knows that it is better to keep the poisonous and the non-poisonous ones apart.

Researchers at EPFL have developed a technology based on nanophotonics and data science to detect and monitor cancer biomarkers at an early stage. Their research is published. Medical doctors examine body fluids of their patients, such as blood, urine, saliva, or nasal swabs, for diagnostics. This is because substances in such biofluids may provide vital information about one's health state.

Scientists at EPFL discover that laser-driven rearrangement of just a few gold atoms inside nanoscale antennas can be observed by the naked eye. Image: Plasmonic nano-antennas fabricated at EPFL: gold nanoparticles are deposited on a gold film covered with a layer of molecules. Light emission from defects near the film surface is strongly enhanced by the antenna effect, enabling its detection. Credit: Nicolas Antille (www.nicolasantille.com).

How is matter distributed within our universe? And what is the mysterious substance known as dark energy made of? HIRAX, a new large telescope array comprising hundreds of small radio telescopes, should provide some answers. Among those instrumental in developing the system are physicists from ETH Zurich.

Researchers from ETH Zurich and University of Zurich have developed a new microscopy technique that lights up the brain with high resolution imagery. This allows neuroscientists to study brain functions and ailments more closely and non-invasively. The way the human brain works remains, to a great extent, a topic of controversy.

An international team led by Empa and ETH Zurich researchers is playing with shape-engineered nanoscale building blocks that are up to 100-times larger than atoms and ions. And although these nano "Lego bricks" interact with each other with forces vastly different and much weaker than those holding atoms and ions together, they form crystals all by themselves, the structures of which resemble the ones of natural minerals.

Scientists at Empa and EPFL have identified a new type of defect as the most common source of disorder in on-surface synthesized graphene nanoribbons, a novel class of carbon-based materials that may prove extremely useful in next-generation electronic devices. The researchers identified the atomic structure of these so-called "bite" defects and investigated their effect on quantum electronic transport.

Researchers have developed a light-based approach to read out superconducting circuits, overcoming the scaling-up limitations of quantum computing systems. In the last few years, several technology companies including Google, Microsoft, and IBM, have massively invested in quantum computing systems based on microwave superconducting circuit platforms in an effort to scale them up from small research-oriented systems to commercialized computing platforms.

Through a unique combination of computer simulations and laboratory experiments, researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have discovered new binding sites for active agents - against cancer, for example - on a vital protein of the cell cytoskeleton. Eleven of the sites hadn't been known before.

Researchers at ETH Zurich have succeeded in turning specially prepared graphene flakes either into insulators or into superconductors by applying an electric voltage. This technique even works locally, meaning that in the same graphene flake regions with completely different physical properties can be realized side by side.

Scientists from the University of Geneva and UZH have used a statistical physics approach to identify the lengthscales of key intercellular interactions which govern tissue healing. In material physics understanding how systems interact across the interfaces separating them is of central interest. But can physical models clarify similar concepts in living systems, such as cells?

Scientists at the UNIGE have shown that the response of the retina to light depends not only on the intensity of the light perceived by the eye, but also on its temporal shape and the order in which the colours are organized. Vision is a complex process that has been successfully deciphered by many disciplines -physics, biochemistry, physiology, neurology, etc.

Quantum systems consisting of several particles can be used to measure magnetic or electric fields more precisely. A young physicist at the University of Basel has now proposed a new scheme for such measurements that uses a particular kind of correlation between quantum particles. In quantum information, the fictitious agents Alice and Bob are often used to illustrate complex communication tasks.

Novel nanoparticles developed by researchers at ETH Zurich and Empa detect multi-resistant bacteria hiding in body cells and kill them. The scientists' goal is to develop an antibacterial agent that is effective where conventional antibiotics remain ineffective. In the arms race "mankind against bacteria", bacteria are currently ahead of us.