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January 2023

First Cooling down of our brand new closed-cycle optical 4K Cryostat, with 24 pins for electrical and thermal transport measurements

The base temperature is 3.9 K! Let’s start to mesure 😀

Students from Engineering Faculty (IPRE 2022)

Roberto y Felipe estan haciendo investigación como proyecto IPRE (Investigación de Pregrado para Alumni Ingeniería UC) que tienen este segundo semestre 2022. Si les interesa, no duden en postular!

Last publication – August 2022

High performance Li-, Na-, and K-ion storage in electrically conducting coordination polymers

Authors: Jiande Wang, Xiaolong Guo, Petru Apostol, Xuelian Liu, Koen Robeyns, Loïk Gence, Cristian Morari, Jean-François Gohy and Alexandru Vlad

Collaboration with the Institute of Condensed Matter and Nanosciences, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, (Belgium), and the Institutul National de Cercetare-Dezvoltare pentru Tehnologii Izotopice şi Moleculare Cluj-Napoca, Cluj-Napoca, (Romania)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1039/D2EE00566B

Organic battery materials rise as potential alternatives for post-Li batteries. However, chemistries with alkali-ion reservoir and high voltage operation remains a challenge in the field, with few developments only recently proposed. Herein, we make use of coordination chemistry to design and synthesize a new class of electrically conducting anionic coordination polymers for all practically relevant alkali-cation storage. The working voltage of these chemistries is nearly by 1 V higher than of state of art organic or coordination polymer chemistries, reaching values of 2.9–3.5 V in Li-, Na-, or K- based cells.

 The best performing candidate shows excellent rate capability (86% of the nominal capacity retained at 10C rate), remarkable cycling stability (96.5% after 1000 cycles), and extreme utilisation conditions of low earth orbit space environment tests. 

These results provide guidelines for higher capacity materials by designing systems with also reversible redox of transition metals.

Read the full article here.

March 2022

Pre-installation of the New Sentech RIE system.

We received the visit of Dipl.-Ing. Roland Kögel, from the Sentech company, to check our SI591 equipment and its final infrastructure.

As the pandemic is almost over in our country, we finally succeed in installing our plasma etcher for Micro-fabrication! This is not very impressive…but yes, this is the first RIE plasma chamber working in Chile ;D !

December 2021

The 2021 Capstone project of Physics Engineering students just ended. With the support of Daniela, they did a great job. Congrats to All!

October 2021

We just won another Fondequip Mediano 2021 Funding for a combined Sputtering/e-beam system for the UC LabNano Cleanroom (see results)! That will allow us to deposit high-quality multilayers of metals, oxide and/or ceramics. We are evaluating the acquisiton of typical systems from Kurt Lesker, AJA, and other brands.

September 2021

The first Chilean Reactive Ion etching arrived last week in the LabNano Cleanrooms!