ESiM Project News

Published on in ESIM NEWS

The ESiM project successfully held its second meeting at the cutting-edge PICO LAB at CEMES-CNRS in Toulouse on February 27th and 28th, 2023. Over these two engaging days, principal investigators, postdoctoral researchers, and PhD students came together to discuss initial findings and meticulously prepare for the project’s first EU review.

Following the meeting, participants engaged in the "Crossroad of Maxwell Demon" workshop, which took place on March 1st and 2nd in Toulouse. This workshop provided an invaluable platform for deeper discussions on the implications of the project’s findings, fostering collaboration and innovation among researchers. The combination of the meeting and workshop highlights the ESiM project’s commitment to advancing research and developing a robust network within the scientific community.

Published on in ESIM NEWS

A collaboration between 4 ESiM partners (TU Dresden, IPF Dresden, CNRS Toulouse, CSIC San Sebastian) has shown that a zwitterionic single-molecule machine can work in two different ways under bias voltage pulses. It is a unidirectional rotor while anchored on the surface. It is a fast drivable molecule vehicle (nanocar) while physisorbed.

In the same experimental conditions, the ESIM partners investigated the inelastic tunneling excitation producing the movement for both the unidirectional rotation of the rotor and the directed movement of the nanocar. The work represents an important step towards the realization of single-molecule machines, converting electrical energy in selected movement.

The work is published in ACS Nano as Article ASAP, DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.2c12128

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.2c12128

Published on in ESIM NEWS

From Wednesday, June 22, until today, collaborators of the ESiM Project (Energy Storage in Molecules) convened in Dresden for their inaugural meeting. Project partners from Germany, Spain, France, and The Netherlands showcased their individual work packages and outlined the roadmap for the 4-year initiative.

Led by Dr. Francesca Moresco of the cfaed SMM Group, the European Pathfinder Open project ESiM aims to harness intramolecular properties, such as rotations and conformational changes, for energy storage. ESiM focuses on storing and releasing energy within specific intramolecular degrees of freedom. The project integrates theory and simulation, molecular design and synthesis, scanning probe microscopy and manipulation, solid-state physics, and nanotechnology.

ESiM kickoff meeting - group photo of the project collaborators

Published on in ESIM NEWS

The EU HORIZON-EIC-2021-PATHFINDEROPEN proposal Energy Storage in Molecules (ESiM) was recently approved and will tentatively start in April 2022.
ESiM aims at creating the scientific basis for addressing the pressing challenges of a scalable clean energy storage. The ESiM strategy makes use of the conformational degrees of freedom of organic molecules, which will be arranged in dense molecular arrays on a surface. This concept circumvents the limits of battery technology which is based on ions flow and on environmentally harmful substances.