Projects
Sabbatical Tatjana Parac-Vogt: Expanding the potential of metal-oxo clusters and metal-oxo cluster based materials in bioinorganic chemistry KU Leuven
The key focus of the sabbatical is to expand the existing collaborations with the international partners and establish new collaborations with groups having similar interest and complementary expertise. The new ideas developed during the sabbatical period will also form a firm foundation for the preparation of Advanced ERC grant application.
Studies of Multiple Metal Doped Silicon Clusters and Design of Novel Materials Based on Clusters Containing Silicon and Germanium. KU Leuven
Tuning graphene into a spin active material: Exploiting its size-specific interaction with metal clusters KU Leuven
The success of semiconductor industry relies on the continuous improvement of the performances of integrated circuits (IC). So far, this has been achieved by reducing the size of the basic building block of these circuits, the metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET). The downscaling of MOSFET’s has been realized by introducing new materials, like high-k dielectric/metal gate stacks and high-mobility semiconductors (Ge, ...
Sabbatical Ewald Janssens: metal clusters for catalysis KU Leuven
The reactivity of small metal clusters differs radically from that of bulk materials because the atoms in a cluster have a lower coordination number, the concentration of reaction centers is high and the electronic band structure has not yet been developed. Not only does the electronic structure appear dramatically with cluster size and composition, too unexpected properties such as the occurrence of selective catalytic oxidation gold ...
Geometric, Electronic and Magnetic Properties of Transition Metal Doped Silicon Clusters, and Development of a Magnetic Deflection Setup KU Leuven
The aim of the work presented in this thesis is to provide deeper understanding on the geometric, electronic, and magnetic properties of gas phase clusters as a function of size and composition using a combination of the spectroscopic techniques and density functional theory (DFT) calculations. The thesis is divided into four parts. A review of recent research on the structural identification of doped silicon clusters is given in Part I. In ...
Computational Studies of Small Boron Based Clusters KU Leuven
From geometrical features of the global minima, a growth mechanism for each series of the BnX clusters was established. The fundamental featuressuch as chemical bonding, electronic distribution, aromaticity, were probed using the analyses of canonical molecular orbital (CMO) in combination with other indices obtained from the electron localization function(ELF), nuclear independent chemical shift (NICS) etc
Quantitatively, ...
Metal-doped carbon clusters as model systems for the chemical storage of hydrogen KU Leuven
Copper clusters as model catalysts for carbon dioxide hydrogenation to methanol KU Leuven
Probing down to the atomic scale the size-dependent electronic and magnetic properties of few-atom clusters. KU Leuven
Small clusters or nanoparticles are potential building blocks for future applications such as spintronics and quantum computing. In this project we will focus on ultra-small clusters composed of one or two types of elements with only two to a few tens of atoms (e.g., Au clusters, Co clusters, B clusters, and binary clusters, e.g. AuPt). In the recently developed cluster beam deposition apparatus, the clusters first will be mass-selected in ...