Copper catalysts: How they work and how to improve them

The UK High-Field Solid-State NMR National Research Facility N has a youtube channel https://lnkd.in/eTbdByyw. See some of the slides from this year's annual symposium that took place in March at Warwick Conferences, with hybrid online joining.

Radiation in space can come in many forms. In our own Solar system, the solar wind provides a constant stream of energetic particles that irradiate icy bodies and molecular layers frozen on the moons and other solar system objects. On Tuesday last, Duncan V. Mifsud Mifsud from the HUN-REN ATOMKI facility in Hungary, talked us through how he uses experiments to understand how these types of radiation influence chemistry in molecular solids. You can find Duncan's talk online, by following the link in the comments. Thank you Duncan for an interesting introduction to radiation studies!

Curious about the hydrogen-bond structure and dynamics of water within the channels of fascinating and versatile lipid cubic mesophases at increasing temperatures? We combined terahertz absorption spectroscopy, small-angle X-ray scattering, and atomistic molecular dynamics to uncover how rising temperature disrupts hydrogen-bond dynamics, leading to shorter lifetimes of the intermolecular modes of water. Interestingly, we also found a positive, non-linear correlation between these lifetimes and the interfacial water population maintained across all investigated temperatures. Check out our new publication in Wiley Small! https://lnkd.in/eRFCvRPD I’m deeply grateful to my supervisor Raffaele Mezzenga for making this work possible. And for the wonderful collaboration with Serena Alfarano, Ph.D., Patrick Züblin, Laura Baraldi and the always insightful and supportive colleagues from Elettra Sincrotrone: Federica Piccirilli, Hendrik Vondracek and Lisa Vaccari.

🚀 In the upcoming Neutron webinar this Friday, the KFN welcomes Prof. Dr. Max Wolff (Uppsala University, Sweden), who will give a talk on: 🔹 Neutrons for the study of hydrodynamics and the solid-liquid boundary 🗓 Friday, 26 September 2025 ⏰ 11:00 – 12:00 CET 📍 Online via Zoom: https://lnkd.in/eX5ruTm8 Polymers and soft matter are defined by weak binding energies and fascinating non-linear flow behavior. To fully understand these complex dynamics, experiments need to probe time and length scales across many orders of magnitude. Neutrons offer unique advantages in this field due to their sensitivity and ability to capture relaxation processes. In this webinar, Prof. Wolff will highlight how neutron scattering experiments, combined with rheological methods, deepen our understanding of hydrodynamic boundary conditions, solid–liquid interfaces, and self-assembly at surfaces. 👉 Don’t miss this opportunity to explore cutting-edge research at the intersection of neutron science, soft matter, and fluid dynamics! #Neutrons #SoftMatter #Rheology #Hydrodynamics #ScienceCommunication #KFN

⚛️ A team of scientists from FCTUC's LIBPhys achieved the best purification of the radioactive isotope 222 Radon (222Rn) in history, achieving a concentration of 430 atoms per ton of liquid xenon target, a value five times lower than that achieved by other experiments using the same technology. 📰 This historic result, obtained as part of the international XENONnT experiment, a system with an unprecedented level of sensitivity in detecting dark matter, is published in the prestigious journal Physical Review X. Full news at: https://lnkd.in/d52axSNu

Hi everyone! I'd like to share a new preprint from the neutrino group at U. Rochester. Neutrons are notoriously difficult to reconstruct in neutrino interactions because they are uncharged and the visible deposits they leave through secondary interactions often correlate poorly with their true kinetic energy. In our newest paper, my colleagues and I propose a novel method that uses the inferred direction of a tagged neutron, together with the other reconstructible particles in the event, to estimate the neutron’s kinetic energy and, in turn, improve the reconstructed neutrino energy. We show that, compared with calorimetry-only (ignoring neutrons) and with simply assigning the entire missing transverse momentum to the neutron, our approach yields neutrino-energy distributions that are better centered on truth and a more symmetric neutron-energy estimate. Our method can feasibly be used on any detector setup that can tag neutrons and infer its direction, including LArTPCs in DUNE and scintillator detectors in T2K! Preprint: https://lnkd.in/gYtmRgEJ

Featuring one of our September 2025 papers published in our special issue on Selected Emerging Trends in Terahertz Science and Technology by Sota Mine, Kodo Kawase, and Kosuke Murate. Higher order terahertz Stokes beams generated 13 terahertz wavelengths to advance real-time spectroscopy for reagent identification. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/eUtxxnCT

Dilepton Program with Time-of-Flight Detector at the STAR Experiment ✏️ Xin Dong et al. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gYwwfEUt Viewed: 2306; Cited: 1   Pairs of lepton and antilepton (dilepton) in a continuous mass range are one of the most experimentally challenging and golden probes of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) produced in heavy ion collisions because they do not strongly interact with the hot and dense medium, and reflect the properties of the medium at the time the dilepton is generated. The measurements of dileptons require lepton identification with high purity and high efficiency at large detector acceptance. STAR is one of two large experiments at the relativistic heavy ion collider with a primary goal of searching for the QGP and studying its properties... Berkeley Lab Brookhaven National Laboratory University of Electronic Science and Technology of China #mdpisymmetry

In a new study in PNAS Nexus, ChemE's Anna Balazs and Oleg Shklyaev reveal how chemical networks can mimic nervous systems to power movement in soft materials. https://lnkd.in/eCJZnNG4

D16 is a cold two-axis diffractometer at the ILL - Institut Laue Langevin. It is one of the oldest instruments but due to continuous upgrades these three bolts are all that remain of original instrument that was brought from Harwell (near the site of ISIS Neutron and Muon Source). One of the original sample rotation axis was from a gun turret. When used in tandem with molecular deuteration this instrument is able provide high spatial resolution understanding of the packing of molecules into lipid bilayers. This perspective is especially useful for fundamental studies of lipid bilayers. In this study we examine the effect of hydrophobic ions in the bilayer. These ions are used as probes of the electrical properties of model membranes. Together with Zihan Zhou, Ron Clarke & SWAPNIL PRABHUDESAI supported by Bruno Deme & Viviana Cristiglio