Theory Department

On 27.04. it was once again time for the girls' day. The colleagues at the Fritz Haber Institute had the pleasure to invite 30 interested girls to a day full of experiments, technology and questions and to introduce different professions in a research institution dealing with areas at the interface of chemistry and physics.
  more

Surfactants play an important role in every day life, for instance as major components in soaps.  Since they feature hydrophilic and hydrophobic parts in their structure, they accumulate at water interfaces with air and can there influence the rate of evaporation of the solution or the efficiency with which gas molecules are taken up by the solution, a process that is for instance important for the incorporation of carbon dioxide into the oceans. How surfactants arrange themselves at the interface of water with air is an intriguing question that has fascinated scientist for centuries, going back to Benjamin Franklin who noted the calming effect of cooking oil on the surface of water, and Agnes Pockels who did some of the first systematic experiments on the subject in the late 19^th century. The question of the arrangement of surfactant molecules at the water-air interface is not easy to answer since a close look at the very skin of liquid water requires methods that hone in on the outer layers of water, where surfactant molecules are located in a layer with a thickness of only a few billionths of a meter. more

Achieving a net zero greenhouse gas balance is a major challenge facing the chemical industry. The goal can be met by reducing the energy demand of chemical processes and the sustainable use of raw materials. Researchers of the Fritz-Haber-Institute have shown that the valuable intermediates propylene and propylene oxide can be formed directly by oxidation of propane in the gas phase over nonspecific interfaces, such as sea sand, without producing significant amounts of CO₂.
  more

High-level synchrotron experiments confirm the sub-atomic precision of a machine-learning based prediction for the adsorption height of graphene at liquid metal catalysts. With such reliability, the AI-approach constitutes a powerful new tool to study the growth process of this much aspired material even under most extreme conditions.
  more