A new technique to trap clusters of platinum atoms in nanoscale islands could lead to more efficient catalysts for the chemical industry. 

Many materials store information about what has happened to them in a sort of material memory, like wrinkles on a once crumpled piece of paper. Now, a team led by Penn State physicists has uncovered how, under specific conditions, some materials seemingly violate underlying mathematics to store memories about the sequence of previous deformations.

This startling mechanism for promoting depolymerization relies on an additive that many plastics already contain: a pigment called carbon black that gives plastic its black color. Through a process called photothermal conversion, intense light is focused on plastic containing the pigment to jumpstart the degradation. The lab’s method has since been tried out on such post-consumer waste as PVC pipes, black construction pipes, trash bags, credit cards, even those ubiquitous yellow rubber duckies. It works on all of them.

With the OSIRIS-REx space probe, the NASA space agency succeeded in collecting some material from the surface of asteroid Bennu, which arrived on Earth in a small capsule in 2023. The analysis of the material by more than 40 scientific teams worldwide – including the team led by Prof. Frank Brenker from Goethe University – revealed a number of organic substances that form the basis for biomolecules. In addition, the minerals in the sample also indicate that the protoplanet from which Bennu originated once had liquid, salty water. Thus, this protoplanet possessed both ingredients for life and potential habitats.

The instrument exploits the phenomenon of optical levitation to "trap" glass nanospheres with light inside it, thanks to which it is possible to simultaneously observe phenomena typical of both classical physics and quantum physics, exploring from an experimental point of view the thin boundary between these two worlds. The study, published in the scientific journal Optica, is the result of the internal synergy of the extended partnership in Quantum Technologies (NQSTI), between the University of Florence, the National Institute of Optics of the Cnr, the Lens Laboratory and INFN.