To separate chemical mixtures into their individual components, energy-intensive distillation is commonly used in industry, such as in crude oil refining. Researchers at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern (TUK) are developing a camera system that monitors this process. It measures whether th…

Water droplets bead up on the lotus leaf, whereas they wet a concrete wall. The reason is the respective surface properties. Tiny structures cause, for example, that a droplet does not adhere. Researchers at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern (TUK) investigate these effects using a 3D high-s…

In 2016, each German drank an average of 104 liters of beer. Brewing this malted barley beverage produces many residues, totaling approximately 400,000 tons annually across Europe. Only a portion of this is recycled as animal feed. Researchers from three disciplines at the Technical University of Ka…

The market for 3D printers is growing: they allow products to be produced quickly and easily. But they are not only used in the visible world for us, but also in the nano- and microcosm. This is made possible by special micro-3D printers. Physicists at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern (TUK…

Smartphone, calculator or dialysis machine – no electronic device is complete without a chip and its electronic circuits. The individual switching elements are often wired through three-dimensional so-called bridge structures. Physicists at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern (TUK) are curren…

Photographers use iris diaphragms to control the amount of incoming light and to set the depth of field. Due to their size and energy consumption, conventional diaphragms have limitations: they cannot be used in mini cameras like those in smartphones or tablets. The situation is different with micro…

What happens in cells precisely at the nanoscale remains a mystery for research so far. How are structures, such as membranes and enzyme complexes, arranged within a cell? How does a cell know where front, back, bottom, and top are? How are spatially and temporally coordinated structures formed? The…

Research understands diffusion as a process in which tiny particles spread evenly in a gas or liquid. Although these media consist of individual particles, diffusion is perceived as a continuous process. Effects of a single collision between particles, the fundamental building block of diffusion, ha…

On the campus of the Technical University (TU) Kaiserslautern, a new research building is being constructed by 2020. In the Laboratory for Advanced Spin Engineering, or LASE, researchers from physics, chemistry, and engineering sciences will delve into the fundamentals of spin phenomena. These pheno…