Success Stories

Water is an ubiquitous chemical substance and a key ingredient for life, but its structure remains poorly understood. Dr Michele Casula and his colleagues from Sorbonne University, Paris, and from SISSA, Trieste have been shedding light on the complex arrangement of the intermolecular network in water using newly-devised numerical methods.

Iron chalcogenides are a recently discovered family of superconductors. Professor Sandro Sorella of SISSA planned to investigate the nature of their superconductivity in a PRACE project, but soon realised that this would be impossible due to unforeseen factors. Instead, the project focused on investigating different methods for carrying out such simulations.

The newest generation of satellites can provide us with incredibly precise data about the surface of the Earth. Professor Xiaoxiang Zhu has been using high performance computers to decipher this data and is using it to provide support to some of the poorest urban areas in the world.

Blue energy, which is the free energy lost when salty sea water and less salty river water meet and mix in estuaries, could become a significant source of global electricity in the future. Capacitive mixing, an up-and-coming technique that exploits the charge-discharge cycle of capacitors can be used to harvest this energy but optimizing the devices employed here has been no easy task. Researchers in France have now shown that molecular simulations can realistically predict the capacitance of devices that contain nanoporous carbon materials as the electrodes and salty water as the electrolyte. When run in reverse this technique is also an efficient way to desalinate water in a process known as capacitive deionization.

A new method for calculating the electromagnetic effects involved in the weak decays of hadrons has been developed by researchers from the three universities and units of INFN in Rome and from the University of Southampton. They have now proved its effectiveness and plan to apply it to various quantities in the field of particle physics.