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A team at EPFL and the University of Arizona has discovered that making molecules bigger and more flexible can actually extend the life of quantum charge flow, a finding that could help shape the future of quantum technologies and chemical control. Their study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the emerging field of attochemistry, scientists use to trigger and steer electron motion inside . This degree of precision could one day let us design chemicals on demand. Attochemistry could also enable real-time control over how break or form, lead to the creation of highly targeted drugs, develop new materials with tailor-made properties, and improve technologies like solar energy harvesting and quantum computing.

But the big roadblock is decoherence: Electrons lose their quantum “sync” within a few femtoseconds (a millionth of a billionth of a second), especially when the molecule is large and floppy. Researchers have tried different methods to sustain coherence—using heavy atoms, freezing temperatures etc. Because quantum coherence vanishes at macroscopic scales, most approaches to sustaining coherence operate on the same assumption: larger and more flexible molecules were assumed to lose coherence more rapidly. What if that assumption is wrong?

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Water is everywhere and comes in many forms: snow, sleet, hail, hoarfrost, and so on. However, despite water being so commonplace, scientists still do not fully understand the predominant physical process that occurs when water transforms from liquid to solid.

Now, in an article published in the Journal of Colloid and Interface Science, researchers from the Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo, have carried out a series of molecular-scale simulations to uncover why ice forms more easily on surfaces than in bodies of water.

While it is common knowledge that water freezes at 0°C (32°F), water does not instantly turn into ice the moment this temperature is reached. Instead, begin forming at tiny “nuclei” and spread throughout the body of water in a process called nucleation. Lower temperatures promote nucleation events and hence speed up the freezing process. Although, at the , other factors can also play a role.

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Turning crude oil into everyday fuels like gasoline, diesel, and heating oil demands a huge amount of energy. In fact, this process is responsible for about 6 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Most of that energy is spent heating the oil to separate its components based on their boiling points.

Now, in an exciting breakthrough, engineers at MIT have created a new kind of membrane that could change the game. Instead of using heat, this innovative membrane separates crude oil by filtering its components based on their molecular size.

“This is a whole new way of envisioning a separation process. Instead of boiling mixtures to purify them, why not separate components based on shape and size? The key innovation is that the filters we developed can separate very small molecules at an atomistic length scale,” says Zachary P. Smith, an associate professor of chemical engineering at MIT and the senior author of the new study.

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Experiments at BESSY II show that during electrolysis, the structure breaks down into ultrathin nickel sheets, exposing the active catalytic centers to the electrolyte. Hydrogen can be produced through the electrolysis of water. When the electricity for this process comes from renewable sources.

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Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, have created a novel pathway into the study of the elusive quantum states in superconducting vortices. The existence of these was flaunted in the 1960s, but has remained very difficult to verify directly because those states are squeezed into energy scales smaller than one can typically resolve in experiments.

The result was made possible by a combination of ingenuity and the expanding research in created in the labs at the Niels Bohr Institute. It is now published in Physical Review Letters.

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