We present mid-IR spectroscopy of three T Tauri stars in the young Chamealeon I dark cloud obtained with TIMMI2 on the ESO 3.6m telescope. In these three stars, the silicate emission band at 9.7 μm is prominent. We model it with a mixture of amorphous olivine grains of different size, crystalline silicates and silica. The fractional mass of these various components change widely from star to st...

Advances in functional materials for energy conversion and storage technologies are crucial in addressing the global challenge of green sustainable energy. This article aims to demonstrate the valuable role that modern modelling techniques now play in providing deeper fundamental insight into novel materials for rechargeable lithium batteries and solid oxide fuel cells. Recent work is illustrat...

Introduction: Micrometeorites are that fraction of the extraterrestrial dust flux that survives atmospheric entry to be recovered from the Earth’s surface. The majority of large micrometeorites (>50 μm), recovered from Antarctic ice, experience significant heating during atmospheric entry with the result that volatilebearing phases, such as clay minerals, have thermally decomposed. A significan...

In the paper entitled ”The shape and composition of interstellar silicate grains” (A&A, 462, 667-676 (2007)), Min et al. explore non-spherical grain shape and composition in modeling the interstellar 10 and 20 μm extinction features. This progression towards more physically realistic models is vitally important to enabling valid comparisons between dust observations and laboratory measurements....

Introduction: Infrared observations indicate that a dominant fraction of the condensed matter found in the interstellar medium (ISM) is amorphous (silicates, organic matter, ices). On the other hand, similar spectroscopic studies show that silicates are mainly crystalline in protoplanetary disks [1]. Furthermore, cometary material appears also essentially crystalline [2, 3]. Because the ISM dus...

Phosphorylation reactions of glycerol were studied using different inorganic phosphates such as sodium phosphate, trimetaphosphate (a condensed phosphate), and struvite. The reactions were carried out in two non-aqueous solvents: formamide and a eutectic solvent consisting of choline-chloride and glycerol in a ratio of 1:2.5. The glycerol reacted in formamide and in the eutectic solvent with ph...

Xenon, which is quite inert under ambient conditions, may become reactive under pressure. The possibility of the formation of stable xenon oxides and silicates in the interior of the Earth could explain the atmospheric missing xenon paradox. Using an ab initio evolutionary algorithm, we predict the existence of thermodynamically stable Xe-O compounds at high pressures (XeO, XeO(2) and XeO(3) be...