Following recent conversations with friends and colleagues, Prof. Cláudio G. Schön, Prof. Ernst Kozeschnik and Dr. Johannes Österreicher, I have come to the conclusion that we should be more optimistic about the future of mankind, and of science, and physics in particular. This holds even when we take into account the geopolitical challenges of the … Continue reading Why I Remain Optimistic About the Future of Mankind
For decades, aluminium alloys forced a choice: the 5xxx family is easy to form but only moderately strong, while the 7xxx family is strong but difficult to process. The crossover concept, developed at Montanuniversität Leoben by the research group of Prof. Stefan Pogatscher, removes that trade-off. A tuned combination of magnesium, zinc and, in some … Continue reading Built for cars, but ready for space: A warm welcome to AMAG CrossAlloy®57!
Aluminium crossover alloys are one of the more interesting recent developments in light metals. Rather than staying within the traditional wrought families, they deliberately blend the chemistries of the AA5xxx and AA7xxx systems, and in doing so they form the compositionally complex T-phase, Mg32(Al,Cu)49, which gives a remarkable hardening response and has already attracted serious … Continue reading On the 3D printing of novel aluminium crossover alloys
Cold spray sounds almost too simple to work: fire a metal particle at a surface fast enough, and it sticks – no melting, no welding, just brute plastic deformation smashing a bond into place. That has been the textbook story for two decades. But in our latest paper with colleagues at Politecnico di Milano and … Continue reading Rethinking how cold spray really bonds dissimilar metals
Airbus has just announced the next phase of its Wing of Tomorrow programme: a three-year flight-test campaign, unveiled at Farnborough, that will bolt full-scale wing extensions onto an A321neo to trial the longer, higher-aspect-ratio wings destined for the successor to its best-selling single-aisle family. The extensions are several metres long and stand in for a … Continue reading Folding, thinner, lighter, and stronger wings signals a quiet retreat for aluminium in aerospace
Qualifying materials for future fission and fusion reactors is painfully slow. Neutron irradiation is costly, time-consuming and leaves samples radioactive, while ion-beam alternatives require competitive proposals and scheduled beam time at oversubscribed accelerator facilities. In a new preprint, we ask whether an instrument already sitting in many microscopy labs — the plasma focused ion beam … Continue reading How much radiation damage can you do in seconds?
What if a single microscope image could simultaneously show nanoclusters, dislocations, grain boundaries, and corrosion pores – all in under a minute? We have found a way to do exactly that and we described recently in a paper published it in Small Methods! The method, called differential phase contrast (DPC), is not new to electron … Continue reading A new way to “see” inside aluminium alloys
Eutectic systems have shaped mankind for millennia — bronze, solder, casting alloys — and yet, for all their industrial pedigree, the nanoscale mechanics of how they actually melt has remained stubbornly out of reach. Experimental resolution simply could not keep up with the physics. A new preprint from our group closes that gap, using in … Continue reading The nanoscale secrets of melting in eutectic systems
I am deeply humbled and grateful to the American Chemical Society and the editors of ACS Materials Au for selecting me as part of the 2025 class of Rising Stars in Materials Science. This recognition came as a wonderful surprise, and I am truly thankful to be included alongside 13 other outstanding early-career researchers from … Continue reading Grateful to be among the 2025 Rising Stars in Materials Science
We are pleased to share our latest preprint, now available on arXiv: Unlocking nanoscale microstructural detail in aluminium alloys through differential phase contrast segmentation in STEM (arXiv:2603.11643). In this work, we show how differential phase contrast (DPC) imaging in scanning transmission electron microscopy can be turned into a powerful, quantitative tool for characterising the microstructures … Continue reading New Preprint: Unlocking Nanoscale Detail in Aluminium Alloys with DPC Segmentation
