Communication

Some 17'000 visitors took part in the fifth edition of EPFL’s science fair Scientastic on 10 and 11 November.  The theme of the fair was “digitalization at your fingertips” and presenters, including NCCR MARVEL, tackled the question of how to make digitalization easy to understand through a series of demonstrations, displays, talks and workshops. This was the fifth edition of EPFL’s science fair – the next will be held in Sion (Valais) on 18–19 May 2019. Some pictures from the MARVEL stand are below: all photo credits to NCCR MARVEL.

An installation sponsored by NCCR MARVEL and EPFL's Institute of Materials now inspires those passing through the entry hall of building MX on the EPFL campus.   

Gabriel Aeppli, professor at the Paul Scherrer Institute and a member of MARVEL's Scientific Advisory Board and Nicola Spaldin, professor at ETH Zurich and a MARVEL Group Leader, are part of a team that have been awarded a 2018 ERC Synergy Grant for their project "HERO" — Hidden, Entangling and Resonating Orders.   

More than 50 people from the materials science scene in Switzerland gathered in Bern on Thursday, 4 October to learn about ongoing CCMX and NCCR MARVEL projects and network. The second Materials Science day featured both experimental and modelling approaches to current challenges in materials science. 

Attracting more than 170 participants, the first edition of the International Workshop on Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials (COMDI 2018) held on September 10-12 at the SwissTech Convention Center was a success!

MARVEL and EPFL have organized the first edition of a  two-week summer camp for high school students destined to graduate next year, in which 13 of them could learn the basics of programming to study materials.

Would you like to organize the fifth MARVEL Junior Retreat next summer? Read about the 2018 retreat that took place in Fieschertal, Valais and get a taste of this special event!

In a study published in Angewandte Chemie, MARVEL members report on the increased stability of tin nitride under compression.

On Thursday, 20 September, Nicola Marzari, director of NCCR MARVEL, spoke on Il Giardino Di Albert, a show on Swiss radio station Rete Due. Dealing with both major issues that directly affect our daily lives (pollution, allergies, food) and laboratory research (medicines, new discoveries, inventions), it encourages popular debate on some fundamental themes of society. 

We are very pleased to announce a collaboration between Materials Cloud and the Nature Research data journal Scientific Data. Materials Cloud is now a recommended repository of Scientific Data.

Another AiiDA tutorial, sponsored by PRACE and the H2020 MaX Centre of Excellence, was organized in collaboration with the Italian CINECA supercomputer centre, who hosted the event. The tutorial took place between May 29 and June 1, 2018, at CINECA Bologna (Italy).

Empa researchers, members of the NCCR MARVEL, together with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz and other partners, have achieved a breakthrough that could in future be used for precise nanotransistors or – in the distant future – possibly even quantum computers, as the team reports in the current issue of the scientific journal "Nature".