2024
Dec, 10 2024: Sonja Matas Montalvo, an exchange student from Spain who is spending the fall semester with our group is helping Chris Reilly with state-to-state scattering experiments of ammonia from a Au(111) surface.
August 27, 2024: Chris Reilly gives an invited talk about his state-to-state CH4 scattering experiments at the 2024 Stereodynamics conference in Cardiff, UK, entitled:
“Conservation of wavefunction reflection parity in methane/surface scattering.
June 17-21, 2024: Mateusz attends the ECOSS-37 conference on surface science in Harrogate, UK and presents a talk on “Probing the mechanism of facile water dissociation on oxygen covered Cu(111) by Reflection Absorption Infrared Spectroscopy (RAIRS)”
On the picture below he can be seen talking to Regis Bisson, a former postdoc of our group, who is now a professor in Aix Marseille University.
May 20, 2024: Dr. Rahul Pandey from the University of Liverpool visited our group for two weeks to learn about gas/surface dynamics experiments and to discuss possibilities for future collaborations.
April, 2024: We had two local primary school classes visit our lab recently. We showed some experiments about invisible light, i.e. infrared and ultraviolet radiation which we use to study chemical reactions of state-prepared molecules with solid surfaces and which also play an important role in the green house effect and climate change.
February 2, 2024: Mateusz Suchodol gives a oral presentation on “Probing water dissociation on a O/Cu(111) surface at the annual meeting of the 38th Swiss Surface and Interface Symposium ( https://saog.ch/ )
February 1, 2024: Chris and Rainer attended the SASP2024 conference in Andalo, Italy. (https://event.unitn.it/sasp2024/) where
Chris won the “Best Poster” award with his poster entitled “Rovibrational stereodynamics of methane scattering from close-packed metal surfaces”
2023
November 23, 2023: We had several groups of high school students visit our laboratory as part of the Journée des Gymnasiens.
Mateusz, Lennard, and Chris were the tour guides and explained our experiments on state-resolved chemical reaction dynamics.
November 7, 2023: A primary school class visits our lab to learn about invisible light and research on molecule/surface interactions.
September 17-24, 2023: Professor Dan Auerbach visits our group for a week to collaborate with Chris’ Reilly on his state-to-state methane scattering experiments.
August 24-25, 2023: Mateusz wins second place in the physical chemistry poster competition at the National Meeting of the Swiss Chemical Society in Bern. On the same day, his paper entitled
“Probing Water Dissociation and Oxygen Replacement on Partially Oxygen-Covered Cu(111) by Reflection Absorption Infrared Spectroscopy” was published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.
You can download it at https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpclett.3c02004
July 22-28, 2023: Mateusz and Rainer attend the 2023 Gordon Research conference on “Dynamics at Surfaces” in Newport, Rhode Island, USA including the traditional sailing excursion on the schooner Adirondack II.
March 24, 2023: Harmina Vejayan gives public thesis defense and receives her EPFL PhD diploma. Well done Harmina !
February 3, 2023: Mateusz, Chris, and Rainer attend the 37th Meeting of the Swiss Working Group for Surfaces and Interfaces in Fribourg (www.saog-gssi.ch).
Mateusz and Chris present each a poster about their work.
2022
November 10, 2022: Mateusz organised a group visit to CERN where we get a very interesting tour of the CMS detector facility.
August 2, 2022: Lennard Reihs, a second year chemistry student at EPFL, joined our group for a summer internship. Currently Lennard is studying O2 sticking on Cu(111).
May 6, 2022: Bo-jung Chen gives his public Ph.D. defence and receives his Doctorate diploma from EPFL.
Congratulations Dr. Chen !
January 18, 2022: Harmina participated in the selection round for the “My thesis in 180 sec” competition and gave a short talk about her experiments on water dissociation on oxygen covered Cu(111).
January 5, 2022: Mateusz Suchodol arrived as new Ph.D student in the Surface Dynamics group. Mateusz holds a 1st class MSci Chemistry degree from the University of Nottingham.
Welcome to the group Mateusz !
2021
November 1, 2021: Patrick Floss is back in the lab, this time as a Ph.D. student. Patrick studied chemistry at the University of Göttingen and has spend 6 months in 2019 in our group working on his Master thesis project. Now he is doing a Ph.D. jointly in the group of Alec Wodtke in Göttingen and our group at EPFL.
October 31, 2021: Dan Auerbach stopped by at EPFL for a week long visit to check on progress with our new BILT machine for state-to-state molecule surface scattering. He also designed a new molecular beam source for our RAIRS machine which currently being made in the chemistry machine shop.
September 10, 2021: Harmina presents her recent results on water dissociation at the fall meeting of the Swiss Chemical Society
July 1, 2021: Bo-jung gives a hot-topic presentation at the International Symposium on Molecular Beams (ISMB2021)
March 16, 2021: Our new Quantum Cascade Laser (QCL) has arrived in the lab. It can produce up to 100mW IR power at 4200 nm. Iwona installed and tested it and she will lock it to a rovibrational transition of CO2 in order to perform state-to-state CO2 surface scattering experiments.
January 14, 2021: Dr. Christopher Reilly started work as a postdoc in the surface dynamics group. Welcome to the group Chris!
2020
Nov 18, 2020: Our latest paper entitled “ State-to-state methane-surface scattering as a probe of catalytic activity” has just been published in Physical Reviews Research: https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.043251
Oct 20, 2020: Our new high resolution, high power infrared OPO system from Toptica was installed in our lab.
October 2020: Iwona Swiderska joined our group for her semester project in molecular sciences 1a as part of her Bachelor studies in Chemistry et EPFL. Here she can be seen filling the bolometer detector of our BILT machine with liquid Helium. Welcome to the group, Iwona !
January 30, 2020: Ana, Harmina, Bo-jung, and Rainer attend the annual meeting of the Swiss working group on surface science (SAOG) in Fribourg. http://www.saog-gssi.ch/saog-2019.html
Harmina win’s first prize for the best poster presentation.
Bravo, well done Harmina !
2019
Dec 17-20, 2019: Ludo Juurlink is visiting the Surface Dynamics group to collaborate with us on quantum state-resolved methane ionization.
December 2019: Prof. Hua Guo from the University of New Mexico is visiting the surface dynamics group in December and January while he is on sabbatical.
1.-7. December 2019: Prof. Bin Jiang from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei is visiting our group for one week.
November 2019: Fabio Busnengo from the University of Rosario in Argentina is back visiting our group for a couple weeks as part of our joint Swiss/Argentina project.
August 2019: Bo-jung, Patrick, and Rainer attend the Gordon conference on Dynamics at Surface in Newport, Rhode Island, USA.
July 10, 2019: LCPM rafting trip on the Dranse river near Thonon France.
31.5.2019: Ana presents her public Ph.D. thesis defence and receives her EPFL Ph.D. certificate. Well done Ana !
1.4. – 31.5.2019: Dan Auerbach is back in Lausanne for two months helping us to get the new state-to-state surface scattering machine up and running.
17.4.2019: Ana does a great job presenting her thesis research and passes her private Ph.D. thesis defence.
1.4.2019: Patrick Floss arrived from the Unversity of Göttingen for six months to do his Master thesis project in our group.
31.1.2019: Ana gives a presentation of her thesis research at the 35th Meeting of the Swiss working group of Surface and Interface Science in Fribourg.
2018
26.11.2018: Prof. Fabio Busnengo (r.h.s) from Rosario Argentina arrive for a collaboration visit with the surface dynamics group.
16.11.2018: Dan Auerbach is back with our group for a month to help build our new rotating bolometer machine. Today he presented a seminar talk on:
“Ion Imaging Measurements of Velocity Distributions and Velocity Resolved Reaction Rates: new insights into CO oxidation on Pt.”
16.10.2018: Our new state-to-state molecule/surface scattering chamber from Vacom GmbH finally arrived with 6 months delay.
25.9.2018: Rainer has been elected Fellow of the American Physical Society
“For pioneering experimental studies of quantum-state-resolved of gas-surface reaction dynamics”
5.9.2018: Physics Today published an article about Ana’s latest paper in Journal of Chemical Physics on the site and bond-selective dissociation of CH3D on Pt(211).
30.8.2018: For the LCPM group day this year, we climbed “la Tour d’Ai” from Leysin followed by a BBQ at Tom’s house.
16.8.2018: Ana’s latest paper on simultaneously bond- and surface-site-selective chemisorption of CH3D has been published as featured article in the Journal of Chemical Physics.
AIP also published a “Scilight” article on our paper.
2.7.2018: Harmina Vejayan with a Master’s degree from St. Andrews University joined our group as a new Ph.D. student.
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15.06.2018: Jörn records amazing high resolution infrared spectra of CH4 scattered from a Ni(111) crystal. Each sharp line tells us about a different quantum state of the scattered methane!
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2-8.06.2018: Ana attends the VI San Luis School and Conference on Surfaces, Interfaces and Catalysis in Santa Fe, Argentina and presents a poster on her recent results:
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28.05.2018: Bo-jung gives a nice presentation of his thesis plan and passes his candidacy exam.
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26.05.2018: Our lab mascot Jane the weasel has finally been caught after visiting our lab for three weeks every night…
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27.04.2018: Jörn presented his public thesis defense and received his Ph.D. Congratulations Dr. Werdecker !
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27.03.2018: Jörn passes his private thesis defence with flying colours. Congratulations !
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12-29.03.2018: Dan Auerbach visits the Surface Dynamics Group to work on the new rotating bolometer machine.
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31.01.2018: Our first state-to-state scattering paper was published in Physical Review Letters today was accompanied by a press release from Mediacom.
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15.01.2018: EPFL Mediacom published a news story on our methane paper on the FSB website.
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07.01.2018: Our paper on methane dissociation made the cover of JCP and the American Institute of Physics (AIP) issued a press release about it.
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04.01.2018: Milica Vasiljevic, with a Master’s degree in Physics from University of Belgrade, joined the surface dynamics group as a new Ph.D. student.
2017
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04.09.2017: Prof. Fleming Crim from the University of Wisconsin at Madison joins our group for a 6 months sabbatical visit.
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03.08.2017: Jörn wins best poster award at the 2017 Gordon conference on Dynamics at Surfaces with this Poster entitled: “Observation of vibrational energy redistribution in a gas-surface encounter: State-to-state scattering of CH4 from Ni(111)”.
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02.08.2017: Ana, Jörn, Rainer and Dan (right to left) attend the Gordon Conference on Dynamics at Surfaces in Newport Rhode Island and go sailing in Newport bay.
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20.07.2017: LCPM group members climb through the trees at Signal the Bougy’s “Parc Aventure” ropes course, followed by a BBQ at Tom’s house.
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08.06.2017: Journée des classes EPFL 2017: We organised 4 workshop for a total of 100 school kids on making “Slime”. Every student got to make his/her own sample of coloured slime using a chemical reaction, play with it and could take it home at the end.
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01.06.2017: Bojung Chen from National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan joined the Surface Dynamics group as a Ph.D. student
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04.04.2017: Dan Auerbach visits the Surface Dynamics group to help design a new state-to-state molecule surface scattering machine for our laboratory.
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21.01.2017: LCPM group ski day in Les Crosets, Portes du soleil
2016
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25.11.2016: Maarten van Reijzen gives his public thesis presentation about state-to-state scattering (of tennis balls !) and receives his Ph.D. diploma.
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04.11.2016: Ana, Julia, and Rainer offered 4 chemistry workshops at EPFL on making “Slime” for children age 10-12 during the Journée des classes 2016.
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30.10.2016: Maarten, Val, Andrew, and Rainer ran in the Lausanne Marathon and as part of the FSB running team.
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21.10.2016: Maarten passed his thesis defence exam with flying colors. Congratulations !
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16.-24.10.2016: Dan Auerbach visits the Surface Dynamics Group to help plan a new state-to-state molecule/surface scattering machine.
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26.08.2016: Maarten van Reijzen won the best oral presentation prize for his talk entitled “State-to-state scattering of methane from clean and graphene covered Ni(111)” at the 3rd International Workshop on Scattering of Atoms and Molecules from Surfaces (SAMS-3) in Bergen Norway.
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28.06.2016: Our tutorial review finally appeared in print in Chemical Society Reviews:
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24.04.2016: Lucy, Chiara, Jörn, Valeriu, Maarten, and Rainer run in the 20 km de Lausanne as part of the FSB running team.
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08.02.2016: Maarten gives a hot topic talk at the 20th Symposium on Atomic, Cluster and Surface Physics (SASP) in Davos Switzerland.
2015
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25.10.2015: Jörn, Maarten, and Rainer take part in the FSB running team for the Lausanne Marathon
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07.09.2015: Our tutorial review article “Quantum state resolved gas-surface reaction dynamics experiments” in Chemical Society Reviews has been selected as a “hot” article and was featured on the Chem Soc Rev blog“. (Helen Chadwick and Rainer D. Beck)
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08-14.08.2015: The whole surface group attended the Gordon Research Conference on Dynamics at Surface at Salve Regina University in Newport, RI in the USA.
Our new group picture taken during the GRC sailing excursion (people left to right): Ana, Helen, Regis (former Postdoc, now Prof. in Marseille), Joern, Maarten, and Rainer.
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23.07.2015: group hiking trip to Lac de Tanay (1408 m) and Le Grammont (2172 m) followed by BBQ at Tom Rizzo’s house
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13.02.2015 : LCPM group ski day in les Diablerets
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01.02.2015 : Ana Gutiérrez González joins the Surface Dynamics Group as Ph.D. student. Ana studied physics at the University of Oviedo and obtained a Master’s degree in Analytical and Bioanalytical Science from Ovideo University.
2014
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27.06.2014: LCPM celebrates its 20th anniversary with a one-day scientific symposium at EPFL. Many former graduate students, postdocs and sabbatical visitors came back to EPFL for the occasion and presented talks.
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28.06.2014: On Saturday we learned how to play Swin-Golf at Basse Ruche in St.-Cergue
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02.05.2014: Morten’s paper on “Vibrationally promoted dissociation of water on Ni(111)” appeared in Science, vol. 344, num. 6183, p. 504-507, 2014.
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10.4.2014: New group photo of the Surface Dynamics Group taken by Alain Herzog:
from left to right: Maarten van Reijzen, Rainer Beck, Helen Chadwick, Joern Werdecker, Morten Hundt
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11.2.2014: Morten presents a hot topic talk on his thesis results at the Symposium on Atomic, Cluster and Surface Physics (SASP 2014) in Obergurgl, Austria. At the meeting, the discussion sessions take place on the ski slopes.
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24.1.2014: Morten Hundt does his public Ph.D. thesis presention and receives his EPFL Doctorate certificate.
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24.1.2014: LCPM ski and showshoe day in Chatel (Portes de Soleil).
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01.01. 2014: Jörn Werdecker with a Master’s Degree in Chemistry from the University of Göttingen joined our team as of January 2014.
2013
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05.09. 2013: Maarten van Reijzen won best Poster Prize in the category “Physical Chemistry” at the Fall Meeting of the Swiss Chemical Society.
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15.08.2013: Morten Hundt won a Young Investigator Prize at the Gordon Conference on Dynamics at Surfaces in Newport RI and presented a 20 min talk on this thesis research.
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14.09. 2013: JOM 2013 – The surface dynamics group (Maarten, Helen and Rainer) with the help Jacques Henry a visiting highschool chemistry teacher from Porrentruy organized a science workshops for children, age 10-13, as part of the “Journee Oser tout les Métiers – JOM” day. This chemistry workshop was about “Slime”, a polymer that has properties both of a liquid and of a solid. The kids made their own sample colored slime using polyvinyl alcohol and borax and got to play with it and explore its properties. We also prepared some non-Newtonian fluid using cornstarch and water and experimented with it by jumping on its surface and bouncing off or standing on it and sinking into it. It was fun and quite messy.
Making colored slime by mixing two liquids with food color.
The reaction succeded and the liquids turned into colored slime.
A mix of cornstarch (Maizena) and water gives a non-Newtonian fluid with strange properties. It flows like a liquid but resists sudden forces like rubber. So you can jump on to and bounce of the liquid without getting your feet stuck in it.
