New Professors 2022
53 new professors were inaugurated at Uppsala University on November 18, 2022. Of them two came from the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
Carl Caleman, Biophysics
Research Presentation
In order to understand how proteins work, it is essential to be able to describe their molecular structure. One way to achieve this is by using X-rays. X-rays also have undesirable properties – they ionise the sample under exposure, which destroys the structure. In recent years, X-ray lasers have paved the way for a new method to determine the structure of proteins. The X-ray laser pulses are short high-intensity pulses, leading to a strong ionisation of the sample.
My research aims to understand how this ionisation process affects the molecular structure of proteins and other biomolecules. The objective is to improve X-ray imaging by better understanding the process causing damage. This will lead to higher resolution of the molecular structures we have, which would benefit science where biomolecular structure is important, such as the design of new medicinal products.
Vassilios Kapaklis, Materials Physics
Research Presentation
Materials properties are determined by structure and chemical composition on different length scales. Being able to control and design them, from the atomic to the macro scale, is vital to material performance and facilitates new and innovative methods of material synthesis. By applying advanced nanotechnologies and microtechnologies to create artificial materials with designed structure and composition at arbitrary length scales, a class of materials called metamaterials is produced. Metamaterials typically exhibit properties beyond those found in natural materials.
My research focus is on how these concepts can be realised in order to create magnetic metamaterials. These consist of billions of interacting and lithographically patterned nanomagnets placed on two-dimensional ‘lattices’. All of the nanomagnets can be combined to mimic the periodic magnetic order of conventional magnets, or even more exotic states, such as magnetic analogues of liquids.
Magnetic metamaterials could play an important role in a new generation of hardware for metamaterial calculations and data storage. These cutting-edge solutions are focused on specific and energy-intensive computational tasks, such as optimisation and partial differential equations arising in artificial intelligence and machine learning. In addition, such systems can be used as models for studying the emergence of structure in a range of complex systems, in biology, economics or societies.