The Laboratory of Environmental Toxicology at NICPB together with the Chair of Analytical Chemistry at the University of Tartu is organizing an international conference EcoBalt 2023. The 23rd environmental chemistry conference will take place on 9 – 11 October, 2023, in Tallinn. The conference follows the previous successful conferences organized in Riga (2021), Vilnius (2018) and Tartu (2016). The topics of EcoBalt 2023 will include Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Toxicology, Analytical Chemistry, Green and Sustainable Chemistry, and Implications and Applications of Nanomaterials.
Abstract submission and registration will open on 1 March, 2023.
Contact: Monika Mortimer, ecobalt2023@kbfi.ee
Graduate student Maria Volokhova defended her PhD thesis “Magnetic Nanomaterials Synthesis and Functionalization for Biomedical Applications” on the 4th of July 2022 in the room SCI-109 (Akadeemia tee 15, Tallinn).
Supervisor: Liis Seinberg PhD (National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics).
Opponents: Associate Prof Yoij Kobayashi (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia).
Associate Prof Janno Torop (Tartu Ülikool, Estonia).
Senior Scientist at the National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics, Dr. Indrek Reile received the Public Choice Award for a presentation “Chemicals around us: how chemical analysis could aid in solving the present-day challenges” at the annual Researchers Night Festival.
The laboratories of NICPB invite PhD students and postdoctoral researchers as well as Master’s and Bachelor students who are interested in a scientific career and outstanding research to join our research teams.
NICPB also welcomes ideas and proposals for extending the research groups and developing our research fields from postdocs as well as independent researchers. For financial support, we would encourage you to consider the following programmes: Mobilitas +, ETAg personal research funding, Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe, etc.
New research topics for students and postdoctoral researchers will be posted here in November, 2020. For interest to join a research topic in NICPB before, we would ask you to take a look at the laboratory webpages and contact the Head of the Laboratory or the research group about joining the research team of interest.
Additional information about NICPB research programmes, researchers and infrastructure can be found on the laboratory webpages.
The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded a competitive 2.5 Million Euros advanced research grant to the principal investigator Girsh Blumberg and a team of researchers from the National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics in Tallinn, Estonia (NICPB) to develop the instrumentation that would enable a study “How do superconductors break time-reversal symmetry?” The work in Tallinn builds on PI-s expertise in studying strongly correlated electron systems and on the expertise of NICPB in the field of terahertz spectroscopy and low temperature physics.
Superconductors are used to build magnets for MRI machines and quantum computers, but even 109 years after the discovery of superconductivity we understand its microscopic mechanisms only in the simplest cases. This research focuses on studying the basic symmetries of superconductors in order to reveal new properties that could prove useful for building new devices including quantum computers. The symmetries observed in nature give rise to conservation laws and the properties of particles. Among the most important of these symmetries is time-reversal – breaking this symmetry leads to a variety of physical effects in condensed matter physics, especially in superconductors.
Our everyday experience shows that past and future are not symmetric: we cannot predict the future just based on our experience from the past! This is captured by the time-asymmetry of the second law of thermodynamics, which says that the entropy always increases.
In contrast, most laws of physics satisfy time-symmetry: such include Newton’s laws, Einstein’s laws, and the basic laws of quantum mechanics. Time-reversal symmetry implies that the equations of motion do not inherently contain a direction for time. Time-reversal symmetry is the motion-reversed symmetry. However, in a system with a magnetic field, the reversed motion of an electron breaks the Newton’s laws, and thus we call the time-reversal symmetry (motion-reversed symmetry) broken. Therefore, the appearance of spontaneous magnetic field is often taken as a signature of broken time-reversal symmetry.
In the context of condensed matter physics, time-reversal symmetry breaking usually implies something that behaves like a magnetic field. Conventional superconductors (lossless conductors of charge current) are robust diamagnets: materials that expel magnetic fields (through the Meissner effect). It would therefore be highly unexpected if a superconducting material would support spontaneous magnetic fields.
Nevertheless, such spontaneously broken time-reversal symmetry states have been suggested for unconventional superconductors, but their identification remains experimentally controversial. For some unconventional superconductors, when these materials are being cooled into the superconducting state, something like a spontaneous magnetization appears. Particularly interesting are unconventional superconductors for which the superconducting state is protected topologically and vortices of the supercurrent can host unconventional particles (Majorana fermions) with potential use in quantum computing applications. However, in striking contrast to the unconventional A phase of superfluid 3He where broken rotational symmetry was directly observed, identification of broken time-reversal symmetry for the superconductors has presented a challenge. The ‘smoking gun’ experiments which could confirm time-reversal symmetry breaking are experiments which are sensitive to a very tiny magnetization. Such novel probes will be developed at NICPB.
Additional info:
Girš Blumberg, girsh.blumberg@kbfi.ee
Urmas Nagel, urmas.nagel@kbfi.ee, +372 5690 1425
The new NICPB activity report has been published. It summarises the developments and major achievements during the 2017 – May 2019 period.
Further reading: Activity report May 2019.
Dr Liis Seinberg and her colleagues prof Shinpei Yamamoto and prof Hiroshi Kageyama received the JSPM (Japan Society of Powder and Powder Metallurgy) Award for Advanced Research.
The research was performed during Liis Seinberg’s PhD studies in Kyoto University. The work was supervised by prof Shinpei Yamamoto (Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences, Kyoto University) ja prof Hiroshi Kageyama (Kyoto University). The thesis “Low temperature Synthesis and Properties of Ferromagnetic-Metal Nanomaterials and Square-Planar Coordinated Iron Oxides” featured five high impact publications.
The award ceremony was in Japan on May 24th 2016.
Today, on April 08, 2016, the Science Council of NICPB elected Urmas Nagel the new director of the Institute for the next five year period. Dr Nagel will assume office on April 29, 2016.
The Science Council of NICPB announces
PUBLIC CONTEST
for the position of the Director of NICPB
According to the NICPB Act, the candidate should be:
1) an Estonian citizen who is proficient in the official language (i.e Estonian) to the extent provided by law;
2) a doctorate in Estonia or who has acquired an academic degree equal thereto in another country;
3) less than 65 years of age.
Deadline for submitting the applications is 22 January 2016 at 16:00 (EET).
Further information: see the announcement (in Estonian) KBFI direktori konkursi kuulutus_2015-12-07
On the 7th December 2015 session the Science Council of NICPB elected the Vice-Rector for Research of the Tallinn University of Technology, Prof Renno Veinthal as its new member and re-elected Research Professor of NICPB, Dr Toomas Rõõm to the Council.
Cultural Foundation of th President of the Republic of Estonia granted the Young Scientists Award of 2013 to NICPB scientist, astrophysicist Elmo Tempel.
Read more: Young Scientist Award
