Atomic Alchemy: Unleashing the Power of Particles

To reach net-zero for CO2 emissions, we need new types of fuels, away from fossil resources. But transportation fuels that we have today - diesel, petrol and jet fuels - remain hard to replace because of their outstanding energy densities. Indeed, the amount of energy per unit volume of fuel is the main parameter in applications where space is premium, such as aviation. Space is even more limited in rockets, yet, rocket fuels do not contain carbon and do not release CO2. So the question for us is, can rocket fuels become our everyday fuels in the earth-bound transportation of tomorrow?

I will present a series of small talks, as chosen by the audience, on my various research projects over the years related to magnetism at the small scale such as its implication to spintronics, topological insulators, proximity induced magnetism in graphene, oxide interfaces, nanoparticles, cube on hexagon epitaxy or spin-polarised low-energy electron interactions.

Light incident on metal nanoparticles can set up a collective electron oscillation, or plasmon. These plasmons offer a powerful tool to concentrate light far beyond what is possible with conventional optics, allowing light to be focused all the way down to the molecular length scale, thus enabling single-molecule optical interrogation. Spatial information is lost during this process, but by pairing spectral information with modelling, we are able to visualise, on an atomic level, how a molecule behaves at catalytically active interfaces.