SNSF awards NCCR MARVEL a second tranche of 18 Million CHF

The Swiss National Science Foundation has awarded MARVEL full funding of 18 million Swiss francs for its second phase, which will run until April 2022.  

Enhancing disorder to create order

Considering how it can unexpectedly screw up almost anything, from Napoleon’s military campaign to your medical treatment, it would be nice to be able to control polymorphism: to have a way to predict whether a substance has polymorphs, and if so, which polymorphs form under which conditions. In a recent paper, MARVEL researchers Pablo Piaggi and Michele Parrinello set out to understand the phenomenon.

Eyeing potential uses, MARVEL researchers pursue discovery, design of topological materials

Topological materials – unusual materials whose surface properties are different from those in the bulk – have generated significant interest in recent years because of their unique characteristics. Topological insulators, for instance, are electrical insulators in the bulk, but conduct electricity on their surfaces or edges.

The Science Behind Modeling Materials at the Atomic Scale

There’s a lot of mystique around quantum mechanics, but it’s actually very simple, says Nicola Marzari, director of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) MARVEL, a center for the computational design and discovery of novel materials.

NCCR MARVEL PIs win swissuniversities grant to scale up computational open science platform Materials Cloud

A team of NCCR MARVEL PIs has won a swissuniversities P-5 grant to further develop the Materials Cloud web platform for Computational Open Science. The project will ultimately allow users to autonomously contribute hundreds of different data entries in the different sections without having to interact with one of the platform maintainers. 

Researchers develop a recyclable catalyst that uses CO2 to produce benzimidazoles

Transforming emitted CO2 into valuable products has been proposed as a way of reducing the amount of this greenhouse gas released into the atmosphere—using it as a raw material could help both close the carbon cycle and reduce the consumption of petrochemicals. Dr. Kyriakos C. Stylianou of EPFL and NCCR MARVEL and EPFL's Professor Paul Dyson have developed a recyclable catalyst that can be used to produce valuable products. The research has been published in Angewandte Chemie.

Photodoping Triggers Purely Structural Phase Transition in a Perovskite

MARVEL researchers were part of a group that used ultrafast X-ray diffraction to show how photodoping triggers a purely structural phase transition in a perovskite. The research was published in Physical Review Letters.

New device simplifies measurement of fluoride contamination in water

Researcher Kyriakos Stylianou from the lab of NCCR MARVEL's deputy director Berend Smit and colleagues have developed a portable and user-friendly device that can measure fluoride concentration accurately and reliably.

EPFL Finals of "My Thesis in 180 Seconds"

Join us to the cheer on the two NCCR MARVEL members participating in the EPFL finals of "My Thesis in 180 Seconds," an international contest asking competitors to present his or her research, in plain language, to a non-specialist audience and a jury made up of researchers, journalists and business people in just three minutes.   

AiiDA tutorial — May 2019

This 3.5-day tutorial is designed to get Master students, PhD students and Postdocs from the field of computational materials science started with writing reproducible workflows. Participants will be introduced to the state of the art in workflow management and high-throughput computations by experts in the field, and gain in-depth hands-on experience using a tool that they can directly apply to their own research.