Research

An international team of glaciologists headed by ETH Zürich and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) and including scientists from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have provided a new estimate for the volume of ice in glaciers throughout th...

Approximately 500 million years ago, the evolution of a mineralised vertebrate skeleton had a knock-on effect, causing many new species to emerge, which in turn conquered new habitats. But how exactly did the skeleton develop? A palaeontologist at FAU is now researching this question in a project fu...

Graphene is a promising material for use in nanoelectronics. Its electronic properties depend greatly, however, on how the edges of the carbon layer are formed. Zigzag patterns are particularly interesting in this respect, but until now it has been virtually impossible to create edges with a pattern...

Transistors are needed wherever current flows, and they are an indispensable component of virtually all electronic switches. In the field of power electronics, transistors are used to switch large currents. However, one side-effect is that the components heat up and energy is lost as a result. One w...

Coralline red algae have existed for 130 million years, in other words since the Cretaceous Period, the time of the dinosaurs. At least this was the established view of palaeontologists all over the world until now. However, this classification will now have to be revised after fossils discovered by...

In future, electronics will be controlled via light waves instead of voltage signals: This is the goal of physicists worldwide. The advantage: Electromagnetic waves of light oscillate at the petahertz frequency. This means that future computers could be a million times faster than the current genera...

Extracting hydrogen using water electrolysis, that is separating water into oxygen and hydrogen using electric current, could contribute to making energy generated from renewable sources more efficient and cheaper to store in future. This method is still too costly at the moment. An interdisciplinar...

Young female scientists of the Department of Chemistry and Pharmacy of Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg invite you to the first "Women in Science" Symposium of FAU. One of the outstanding characteristics of this symposium, which takes place from December 9th - 11th, 2018, is that the...