Professor Dietl joined the NCN Council in March 2023. At the inaugural meeting of the Council, which took place in its new composition on Friday, December 20, for the first time in Warsaw, at the seat of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Prof. Dietl was unanimously elected as its chairman. He is the seventh head of the NCN Council.

Our scientists have discovered that a coverage of GaN nanowires with an ultrathin oxide shells significantly increases intensity of GaN luminescence and prevents photodegradation of the nanowires exposed to an environment. That finding is important for future application of nanowires in semiconductor light emitters, as LEDs or lasers.

Our scientists have discovered that antimony triselenide spontaneously forms longitudinal high-quality crystal structures, nano-stripes, in the process of molecular beam growth. This quasi-one-dimensional van der Waals semiconductor may therefore become a material with potentially interesting applications for the construction of semiconductor neural networks, gas sensors and linearly polarized light...

We are pleased to announce that Professor Carmine Autieri, our colleague and MagTOP employee, has been awarded the Stefan Pieńkowski Scientific Prize in 2024 by the 3rd Division of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Natural Sciences). We sincerely congratulate the laureate and wish him continued fruitful work.

Nature's imperfections can sometimes unlock interesting and sought for properties. A team from IP PAS and MIT has found that structural point defects can serve as the origin of unusual photoluminescence in the visible range.

The term "topotaxy" describes crystal growth process based on recrystallization in which the crystallographic orientation of the parent crystal determines that of the product composed crystal. Recently, a new method was developed and reported in the journal "Nature Nanotechnology" that converts InAs wurtzite nanowires into Eu3In2As4 by this novel process.

Researchers have extended the traditional Fermi-Dirac distribution to non-Hermitian systems. This new formalism provides a general framework to compute quantum many-body observables in equilibrium systems coupled to dissipative environments.

Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs), essential for regulating critical cellular functions, have long posed research challenges due to their lack of fixed three-dimensional structure. They are now more accessible for study thanks to a new model that enables rapid and precise analysis of their hydrodynamic properties, marking a significant breakthrough in biophysical research.

We control and monitor the state of the single superconducting vortex. Using our fastest thermometer in the nanoworld, we measured the thermal transient due to the vortex expulsion from the superconductor. An energy dissipated due to this expulsion is equivalent to the absorption of a single photon of the visible light.

We report on the first experimental realization of pentagonal nanowires within ionic compounds using Pb1-xSnxTe. The structures are potential candidates for realizing higher-order topology. The disclination and twin boundaries cause the states originating from the core region to generate a conducting band connecting the valence and conduction bands forcing a metallic phase.