Nobel Prize

Summary

The Nobel Prizes (noʊˈbɛl ; Nobelpriset nʊˈbɛ̂lːˌpriːsɛt; Nobelprisen nʊˈbɛ̀lːˌpriːsn̩) are five separate prizes that, according to Alfred Nobel's will of 1895, are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, and industrialist most famously known for the invention of dynamite. He died in 1896. In his will, he bequeathed all of his "remaining realisable assets" to be used to establish five prizes which became known as "Nobel Prizes." Nobel Prizes were first awarded in 1901. Nobel Prizes are awarded in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace (Nobel characterized the Peace Prize as "to the person who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses"). In 1968, Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden's central bank) funded the e

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Dinuclear gadolinium (III) chelates

Jéröme Costa

In 2003, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute has awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology to Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield for their seminal discoveries concerning the development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), a non-invasive diagnosis technique notably used in medicine to visualize the human internal organs and to distinguish between healthy and pathological cells. For this purpose, contrast agents are valuable tools that enhance this distinction which is resulting from the difference in the water content of the different tissues. These drugs are used nowadays in more than 30% of the 60 millions MRI examinations performed each year. And both numbers are still growing fast. Most of the contrast agents contain a paramagnetic ion (GdIII) that accelerates the relaxation of the water protons by providing them a new relaxation pathway. Relaxivity is a way of quantifying the contrast agent efficiency and is governed by four key parameters: hydration number of the lanthanide ion, water exchange rate, electronic relaxation rate and rotational correlation time of the system. A judicious simultaneous optimization of these parameters is predicted to result in a 20-fold increase in relaxivity compared to the currently used contrast agents. In this work, with the aim of increasing the relaxivity and better understanding the involved mechanisms, the synthesis and physico-chemical characterization of new dinuclear GdIII complexes, based on thoroughly studied monomeric equivalents, were performed. We particularly stressed the outmost importance of introducing rigidity together with the increased size of the system, for a flexible assembly will hinder the relaxivity gain brought by the higher molecular weight. This rigidity is induced by using an aromatic linker between the chelating subunits or by means of the self-assembling properties of terpyridine units around FeII or RuII. We investigated the thermodynamic stability, which in crucial for toxicological reason, the spectrophotometric properties, and the rotational and water exchange dynamics of these complexes. As a result, a remarkable increase in relaxivity is obtained for all the studied compounds with respect to the clinically used actual contrast agents. Finally, insights into a promising novel class of MRI contrast agents acting simultaneously as luminescence probes are provided.

EPFL2005

Compact lensless digital holography

Manon Rostykus

Microscopy is of high interest for biology since it allows imaging features that are too small to be seen with naked eyes. However, cells are mostly transparent to visible and infrared light which makes it difficult to see with a traditional microscope. To do so, phase imaging was invented by F. Zernike, who received the Nobel prize in 1953 for this invention. It provides intensity contrast to visualize transparent samples such as those found in biology without any staining. Among the different implementations of phase imaging, digital holographic microscopy (DHM) is a well-known phase method which provides a quantitative value of the phase generated by the sample under test. Implementations of DHMs without the help of any lens element (so called lensless) offer the added advantage to provide large field of views (severalmm2 compared to several hundred ¹m2) and more compact setups than traditional DHMs which have high quality microscope objectives. The lateral resolution is limited by the pixel size of the camera. However, several techniques have been developed to obtain subpixel resolution with lensless setups, hence giving a resolution smaller than the pixel size. In this thesis, two lensless transmission DHMs are presented using a side illumination technique in order to further reduce the device size and keep a visual access to the sample. The first one operates in an in-line configuration: the most compact but using time-consuming image post-processing. The second one is also lensless and uses an off-axis configuration allowing quasi-real time imaging but less compact. Their practical use is described and images of transparent (phase only) samples are shown. Super-resolution (subpixel) using several subpixel shifted holograms was then investigated for the in-line configuration and demonstrated on absorptive samples. Since those microscopes are compact and made out of off-the-shelf low priced elements, they could be broadly spread in schools for educational purposes. They could also be implemented in cells incubators, allowing visualization inside processes at low cost and multiplication of the number of measurements made at the same time.

EPFL2018

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CONSPECTUS: Atomic crystals of two-dimensional materials consisting of single sheets extracted from layered materials are gaining increasing attention. The most well-known material from this group is graphene, a single layer of graphite that can be extracted from the bulk material or grown on a suitable substrate. Its discovery has given rise to intense research effort culminating in the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov. Graphene however represents only the proverbial tip of the iceberg, and increasing attention of researchers is now turning towards the veritable zoo of so-called "other 2D materials". They have properties complementary to graphene, which in its pristine form lacks a bandgap: MoS2, for example, is a semiconductor, while NbSe2 is a superconductor. They could hold the key to important practical applications and new scientific discoveries in the two-dimensional limit. This family of materials has been studied since the 1960s, but most of the research focused on their tribological applications: MoS2 is best known today as a high-performance dry lubricant for ultrahigh-vacuum applications and in car engines. The realization that single layers of MoS2 and related materials could also be used in functional electronic devices where they could offer advantages compared with silicon or graphene created a renewed interest in these materials. MoS2 is currently gaining the most attention because the material is easily available in the form of a mineral, molybdenite, but other 2D transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) semiconductors are expected to have qualitatively similar properties.In this Account, we describe recent progress in the area of single-layer MoS2-based devices for electronic circuits. We will start with MoS2 transistors, which showed for the first time that devices based on MoS2 and related TMDs could have electrical properties on the same level as other, more established semiconducting materials. This allowed rapid progress in this area and was followed by demonstrations of basic digital circuits and transistors operating in the technologically relevant gigahertz range of frequencies, showing that the mobility of MoS2 and TMD materials is sufficiently high to allow device operation at such high frequencies.Monolayer MoS2 and other TMDs are also direct band gap semiconductors making them interesting for realizing optoelectronic devices. These range from simple phototransistors showing high sensitivity and low noise, to light emitting diodes and solar cells. All the electronic and optoelectronic properties of MoS2 and TMDs are accompanied by interesting mechanical properties with monolayer MoS2 being as stiff as steel and 30x stronger. This makes it especially interesting in the context of flexible electronics where it could combine the high degree of mechanical flexibility commonly associated with organic semiconductors with high levels of electrical performance. All these results show that MoS2 and TMDs are promising materials for electronic and optoelectronic applications.

2015