Nature produces soft materials with fascinating combinations of mechanical properties. For example, the mussel byssus embodies a combination of stiffness and toughness, a feature that is unmatched by synthetic hydrogels. Key to enabling these excellent mec ...
Catalysts play a major role in chemical synthesis, and catalysis is considered to be a green and economic process. Catalysis is dominated by covalent interactions between the catalyst and substrate. The design of non-covalent catalysts came into limelight ...
This thesis investigates the magnetic properties of single atoms and molecules adsorbed on thin magnesium oxide decoupling layers, grown on a silver single crystal. To address these systems experimentally, we use a low temperature scanning tunneling micros ...
Mechanochemistry harnesses mechanical force to facilitate chemical reactions. Traditionally, the field of polymer mechanochemistry has used methods to activate chemical bonds, which use forces that are larger than those that are required to break a covalen ...
The combination of palladium salts and bipyridyl ligands can lead to the formation of a large variety of coordination complexes, with different shapes and sizes, displaying a very versatile host-guest chemistry. Increasing their structural complexity remai ...
Thin polymer coatings present a method to modify the surface properties of underlying substrates. Polymer-coated surfaces have been used as anticorrosive materials, surfaces with special wetting properties, antifriction materials, and as materials for biom ...
The subject of the present work is discovery and in-depth characterization of a new class of functional materials. Tuning of the bond polarity and orbital occupation with a goal of establishing balance between localization and delocalization of electrons - ...
Solving native structures of such large molecules, like biomolecules, is often challenging, particularly due to the potentially infinite number of non-covalent interactions with water. In this thesis, we report the use of cold ion gas-phase action spectros ...
We report neutron scattering measurements on YbMnSb2 which shed light on the nature of the magnetic moments and their interaction with Dirac fermions. Using half-polarized neutron diffraction we measured the field-induced magnetization distribution in the ...
We report a combined polarized and unpolarized neutron diffraction study on a multiferroic Sr2CoSi2O7 (SCSO) single crystal below and above the antiferromagnetic ordering temperature TN = 6.5 K. Unpolarized neutron diffraction measurements at 15 K confirm ...