LSF Scientific Highlights and News

Ultra-fast operando X-ray diffraction experiments reveal the temporal evolution of low and high temperature phases and the formation of residual stresses during laser 3D printing of a Ti-6Al-4V alloy. The profound influence of the length of the laser-scanning vector  on the evolving microstructure is revealed and elucidated.  

In this work, the complementarity of pump-probe experiments at SwissFEL (ALVRA endstation) and at synchrotrons (SuperXAS beamline of SLS and ID09 of ESRF) is used to investigate the triplet excited state of Cu OLED materials. Details about the charge transfer and structural rearrangements in the excited state of this material are revealed and obtained data can be used to verify computational methods for rational development of new OLED materials.

We monitored the dynamic structure of the active sites in a catalyst containing highly dispersed copper-oxo species on ceria during low-temperature CO oxidation using time-resolved X-ray absorption spectroscopy. We quantitatively demonstrate that the CO oxidation mechanism below 90 °C involves an oxygen intermediate strongly bound to the active sites as well as the redox activity of Cu²⁺/Cu⁺ and Ce⁴⁺/Ce³⁺ couples.

Unlike the homogeneous Wacker process, the understanding of the mechanism of the heterogeneous system has long remained to be superficial. Here the authors investigated the mechanism of heterogeneous Wacker oxidation over Pd-Cu/zeolite Y through transient XAS coupled with kinetic studies and chemometric analysis.

Transition metals, characterized by their partially filled d-orbitals, provide the basis for many of the most relevant processes in chemistry, biology, and physics. Embedded as single atoms or in small clusters, they give rise to exceptional optical, chemical, and magnetic properties. So far, it has proven impossible to disentangle the complex network of excited quantum states, which greatly hinders predicting and controlling of material properties. We employed double-resonant four-wave mixing spectroscopy to quantitatively resolve the bright and perturbing dark quantum states of the neutral copper dimer.

To date the electrochemical activity of battery materials was always relying in the oxidation/reduction of cationic redox (change of oxidation state of transition metals generally). However, recently, it was established in new cathode materials (so call Li-rich cathode) that the oxygen from the crystal lattice might also play the role of anionic redox center leading to enhance then the specific charge of battery materials.