Research

The right temperature ensures the success of technical processes, the quality of food and medicines, or affects the lifetime of electronic components and batteries. Temperature indicators enable to detect (un)desired temperature exposures and irreversibly record them by changing their signal for a r...

The group around Prof. Dr. Sjoerd Harder, Chair of Inorganic and Organometallic Chemistry, just reported in Nature Communications a new class of catalysts for hydrogenation, one of the most important industrial processes for the production of bulk or fine chemicals. With smallest catalyst quantities...

Molecular photoswitches are molecules which undergo geometric and physical changes upon light irradiation. Properties such as color, chemical reactivity or biological activity can be controlled by light of a certain color range. Nature also uses molecular photoswitches, with retinal being one of ...

The Chair of Physical Chemistry I (Prof. Dr. Dirk M. Guldi) and the Chair of Materials Science (Materials of Electronics and Energy Technology, Prof. Dr. Christoph Brabec) cordially invite all interested students and (junior) researchers to the Next Generation Solar Energy Conference, which will tak...

To comply with the worldwide increasing demand for renewable energy, new tailor-made concepts are required to capture and store solar energy for different applications and at different scale. Beside the well-established approaches for energy storage, such as batteries or power-to-X, smart molecular ...

The acidity of molecules can be easily determined, but until now it was not possible to measure this important property for atoms on a surface. By combining a new microscopy technique and quantum chemical calculations, this has now been achieved. The degree of acidity or alkalinity of a substance...

Chemists at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg publish a breakthrough in magnesium chemistry in the highly renowned journal Nature. Magnesium (Mg) is an earth abundant early main group metal of low electronegativity that easily loses it’s both valence electrons. In combination w...

Environmental pollution caused by microplastics and nanoplastics is a ubiquitous problem which cannot be tackled using currently available cleaning concepts. Researchers at FAU have now demonstrated how magnets could be used to remove plastic particles of various types and sizes from water. They ...

Prodrugs are substances that only release their effects once they have been metabolised. The prodrugs of the FAU research team led by Prof. Dr. Andriy Mokhir, Professorship of Organic Chemistry, are activated in the organism by means of a chemical reaction with specific molecules that contain oxygen...

Molecular nitrogen (N2) is a highly stable gas with a N≡N triple bond that is among one of the strongest known chemical bonds. It reacts with hardly anything and is used as a protective gas for food storage. Being the main component of air, it is also used by plants as a nitrogen source. However, in...