At extremely small scales, looks can be deceiving. While at first glance you might see lily pads floating on a tranquil pond, this image is actually a clever adaptation of a snapshot taken on a scanning electron microscope.
In reality, the green spots are only a few micrometers across—smaller than width of a human hair. They make up a surface coating that was developed to limit the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The coating is composed of a silver-based material applied to a glass surface. The lotus flower, though, was some added artistic flair courtesy of image-editing software.
Mohsen Hosseini, Ph.D. candidate in chemical engineering, and William Ducker, professor of chemical engineering, recently won an award in the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI) image contest with this image. Both Hosseini and Ducker are affiliated with the Macromolecules Innovation Institute (MII).
EPFL engineers have developed a low-temperature annealing method that maintains the structure of gold and silver when the two metals are combined in an alloy. Their discovery will prove useful in the manufacture of contact lenses, holographic optical elements and other optical components, since the new alloys reflect the full spectral range.
Gold, silver, copper and aluminum are widely used in the manufacture of optical components because of their reflective properties. Gold, for instance, reflects red light, while silver reflects blue light. These metals are also of interest to scientists, who study them at the nanoscale, since nanostructures have a completely different optical response than bulk materials. At this scale, light interacts differently than it would with the same metal in a larger quantity, such as in a gold bar. Engineers at the Nanophotonics and Metrology Laboratory (NAM), part of EPFL’s School of Engineering (STI), set themselves a challenge: to develop a material that reflects every color in the spectrum.
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An abandoned mausoleum and silver extraction taking place on an industrial scale at a Roman site in rural Kent have left archaeologists with a 1500-year-old mystery.
Archaeologists working on an excavation at Grange Farm, near Gillingham, discovered 15 kilograms of litharge—a material associated with the extraction of silver from other metals. This is the largest amount ever found on a British Roman site and greatly exceeds the amount that archaeologists would normally expect to find on a rural settlement such as that at Grange Farm, suggesting that the refining of silver was taking place on an industrial scale. Read more.
