SciComm at wikipedia

Wikipedia is great! So much knowledge that is curated by a very supportive community. It's perfect for science communication and today I wrote my first article about polysulfobetaines. 🥳

Back in the lab

Levitating copper samples comes with a price, especially at high temperatures.

Small amounts of the sample evaporate and condensate at the electrodes. At some point, the electrostatic field is not stable anymore. Still, kind of beautiful...

Oh, and I finally had time to figure out how to put images in this acadiary 🥳

Beautiful writings #2

'Ich wollte immer Wissenschaftlerin oder Autorin werder, um in meiner Nerdhaftigkeit weitgehend ohne andere Menschen in einem geschlossenen System arbeiten zu können.'

Sybille Berg, NERDS retten die Welt - Gespräche mit denen, die es wissen, KiWi (2021)

Back at the DLR 🚀

I am back in the DLR labs to do some more levitation experiments. We have a pretty good idea about the strucutre-dynamics relationship in the binary CuTi system. Now it's time to look at the properties of ternary CuTi-Si and CuTi-Al systems.

It's fascinating how only a few at% of Si or Al can change the macroscopic behavior of an alloy. Since its so little Si or Al, we don't think it's a topological or packing, but a chemical phenomenon based on attractive/repulsive interactions of the minor additive (Si/Al) to Cu and Ti.

With these studies, we aim for improving algorithms of molecular dynamics simulations, which require reliable (that's why we levitate the samples) experimental data as input. So far, only few ternary CuTi-based alloys were investigated. Probably because perfoming experiments with these alloys are everything but trivial. To quote my colleague: All easy systems are already measured. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Beautiful writings #1

'As a results, the special and shortened Al-Cu bond allows chemistry (stable bonding) and topology (dense packing) to work in concert.'

Chen et al., PRL, 102, 245501 (2009)

A colleague just gave an update about his research. He had a graph with viscosity data that span over 17 (!) orders of magnitude!

But what does this actual mean? And what actually is viscosity, with this weird unit (Pa s)? I tried to give a comprehensive answere here.

Hello imposter...

Today I was once again thinking about not releasing this website. It's not professional enough, it's not interesting enough, who cares about my research anyway, why bother with all this html coding, and in the end you might even have to pay money for hosting your webpage...

Well, since you are reading this, it's obvious that I did launch this webpage. Sometimes ideas have to be realized. They have to leave your imagination and enter existance. My webpage, my party. I like it. It's fun. If you like it as well, be my guest. If you don't like it, I hope you find whatever party you are looking for somewhere else ✌🏽

Oh wow, I just had a meeting with my former PhD supervisor about a potential scientific future and now I am super excited about ALL the possibilities out there.

I am such a priviledged, happy, and now even more motivated scientist. That reminds me once again how important it is to have motivating and encouraging people around you.

Definitely something I want to be for others, doesn't matter if in academia or not. How are you feeling about this?

And I finally finished the code for this academic diary. From now on everything will be live 😅

Read to write...

Reading, reading, reading... and I did some writing, too! Great day, me happy!

The reading challenge is going better than expected. Actually, I found some interesting stuff, which will definitely help me for my manuscript.

Apropos manuscript, I really should finish the first version of the figures...first thing on yesterday's to-do list...

Had a nice meeting with the guys from DLR, Cologne! Together, we figured out what is still missing for the first manuscript draft.

Feels good to have a list with boxes to tick off!

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE! 🥳

Happy new year, everyone! I am back in the office and already started my ambitious academic resolution:

One paper a day (keeps the imposter away?! Or maybe not, we'll see).


Anyhow, last year, whenever I started to read a paper, I ended up thinking:

'Why are you wasting your time, reading this paper, which is (at best) marginally related to your stuff! You should better write or measure someting'


And of course, whenever I wrote or measured something I thought: 'Damn, you know nothing! You better read some papers, man'


For this year, I decided to not think about this anymore. I will read one paper (or 45 min if it's a long one) first thing in the morning. Cannot hurt, right?!