news 2015

Pole dancing water molecules - Researchers at the TU Wien have seen this remarkable phenomenon on the surface of an important technological material. Perovskites are materials used in batteries, fuel cells, and electronic components, and occur in nature as minerals. Despite their important role in technology, little is known about the reactivity of their surfaces.

The University of Applied Sciences Salzburg and the University of Vienna today announced project PROMISE - a joint research project in the area of smart grids. The PROMISE project aims to explore new opportunities for analyzing data and Smart Grid Operation processes through the latest analytical techniques such as process mining.

Nitrification plays a key role in Earth's natural nitrogen cycle and in agriculture. This process comprises two sequential steps, and for more than 100 years experts have assumed these steps to be carried out by different microorganisms. Now an international team of scientists led by Holger Daims and Michael Wagner, microbiologists at the University of Vienna, has discovered microbes that perform complete nitrification on their own: A result contrasting textbook knowledge and a milestone of microbiology.

A team of international researchers performed an experiment in the Vienna Hofburg to observe quantum entanglement with unprecedented certainty. Researchers in Anton Zeilinger's group from the Quantum Optics, Quantum Nanophysics and Quantum Information division of the University of Vienna physics department and from the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) Vienna of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW), in an international collaboration, have demonstrated a definitive confirmation of quantum entanglement.

When people are listening to music, their emotional reactions to the music are reflected in changes in their pupil size. Researchers from the University of Vienna and the University of Innsbruck, Austria, are the first to show that both the emotional content of the music and the listeners' personal involvement with music influence pupil dilation.

The longer an apple retains its beautiful colour, the better it is - especially for the food industry. Therefore, the industry works intensely on inhibiting the "browning" of fruits. Chemists of the University of Vienna around Annette Rompel moved a step closer to this ultimate goal. Everybody knows this phenomenon: After slicing an apple, it loses its appetising white colour very quickly, which does not only scare off children.

Wild-caught chimpanzees, who were orphaned and imported from Africa in their early infancy, exhibit an impaired social behaviour also as adults. So far long-term effects of early traumatic experiences on social behaviour were known only for humans and socially isolated chimpanzees. An Austrian-Dutch research team led by Elfriede Kalcher-Sommersguter and Jorg Massen published these results in the scientific journal "Scientific Reports".

Theoretical physicists in Innsbruck have proposed a scalable quantum computer architecture. The new model, developed by Wolfgang Lechner, Philipp Hauke and Peter Zoller, overcomes fundamental limitations of programmability in current approaches that aim at solving real-world general optimization problems by exploiting quantum mechanics.

Is brain size related to cognitive ability of humans? This question has captured the attention of scientists for more than a century. An international team of researchers from the Universities of Vienna (Austria), Göttingen (Germany), and Tilburg (Netherlands) provides no evidence for a causal role of brain size for IQ test performance.

Ravens spontaneously solve a task that requires both coordination and cooperation - an ability that so far only a handful of species like chimpanzees and elephants have proved to master. A team of researchers led by Thomas Bugnyar of the Department of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna showed this for the ravens using an experimental set-up.

The ability to feel the pain of others is based on neurobiological processes which underlie pain experience in oneself. Using innovative methods, an international research team headed by psychologist Claus Lamm from the University of Vienna could show that a reduction of self-experienced pain leads to a reduction in empathy for pain in others as well.

Scientists at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) have figured out how a platinum catalyst works. Its remarkable properties are not just due to the platinum, the iron-oxide substrate beneath also plays a role. Left: Tiny platinum nanoparticles on an iron oxide surface. center: H2 gas leads to trenches in the surface.

If there is a certain pool of choices (eg. A, B and C) and we can exclude A and B, we can easily deduce that C must be the appropriate choice. The ability of animals to be able to solve this sort of logical inference has been the focus of many studies in recent comparative cognitive research. However, only few managed to establish a comparatively applicable task.

Quantum physics tell us that even massive particles can behave like waves, as if they could be in several places at once. This phenomenon is typically proven in the diffraction of a matter wave at a grating. In a European collaboration, researchers carried this idea to the extreme and observed the delocalization of molecules at the thinnest possible grating, a mask milled into a single layer of atoms.

A team of physicists from the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences have demonstrated a new quantum computation scheme in which operations occur without a well-defined order. The researchers led by Philip Walther and Caslav Brukner used this effect to accomplish a task more efficiently than a standard quantum computer.

Plants and bacteria make use of sunlight with remarkably high efficiency: nine out of ten absorbed light particles are being put to use in an ordinary bacterium. For years, it has been a pressing question of modern research whether or not effects from quantum physics are responsible for this outstanding performance of natural light harvesters.

[ Florian Aigner A theoretical trick allows scientists to describe quantum states of thousands of atoms. If standard methods were used, all storage capacity in the world would not be enough to do this. For a long time, quantum experiments were only carried out with a small number of particles. Even the behaviour of single atoms or molecules can be very hard to describe.

[ Florian Aigner Nanostructures etched into the surface: TU Wien develops a new processing technology to improve the electrical properties of glass ceramic circuit boards As you ease your foot off the accelerator, a radar sensor detects how far away you are from the other cars and intelligently adjusts your speed appropriately.

Scientists from the Vaziri lab at the Vienna Biocenter (Austria), together with colleagues at the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics at the University of Chicago, have developed a method using infrared spectroscopy and atomistic modeling that would allow to better understand the mechanism behind the extreme ion selectivity and transport properties in ion channels.

Archaea belong together with Bacteria to the first organisms that emerged on Earth. These microorganisms existed hundreds of millions of years before the more complex cell structures of Eukaryotes developed that gave rise to macroscopic life, i.e. plants and animals. An international team of researchers from Uppsala (Sweden), Bergen (Norway) and Vienna (Austria), has found a novel group of Archaea in deep ocean sediments, who are the closest direct relatives of the eukaryotic lineage.