RSEF2026
My Congress
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I will show how to understand spreading cell clusters as active liquid droplets that wet a substrate. I will discuss applications of our active wetting theory to explain (i) embryo implantation, (ii) collective durotaxis — the migration of cell clusters along gradients of substrate stiffness — as the motion of a droplet on a wettability gradient, and (iii) the asymmetric shapes of migrating cell clusters, with different front and back contact angles.
Ultrafast lasers have long since moved from scientific laboratories to being used around the world, from manufacturing lines to the doctors office, but they continue to drive fundamental scientific discovery. In this talk I will outline our work on using new types of ultrafast sources to study quantum materials, and how time domain studies can reveal hidden states and disentangle complex interactions in these systems.
In this talk, I will review the scientific and instrumental developments that led to the creation of Nanotec Electrónica S.L., a company that designed, built, and commercialized scanning probe microscopes from 1998 to 2014 and played an important role in disseminating this technique throughout Spain. The story begins with the problem of nanocontacts and the Landauer formalism. The scanning tunneling microscope emerged as an excellent tool for studying electrical transport through atomic-scale contacts, revealing the quantization of conductance. These experiments motivated the development of a scanning probe microscopy controller, the mechanical design of an atomic force microscope, and the WSxM software package, which is still widely used in academia. Together, these three components made it possible to build a complete STM/AFM system. From that point onward, the Foundation of Nanotec was simply a matter of determination.
When the interaction between light and matter is strong enough, photon and matter excitations mix to create hybrid light/matter states called polaritons. Traditionally, their hybrid character has been used to achieve new functionalities in which polaritons are utilized as dressed photons. However, over the last ten years, it has been demonstrated that the strong light-matter coupling regime can be used with an alternative purpose: to significantly modify material properties by dressing the matter excitations. Under strong coupling conditions,it has been shown that energy transport and harvesting in organic materials can be enhanced and that the energy landscape of the molecules can be altered in such a way that photochemical reactions and even ground-state chemical reactions can be modified. In this talk, I will present the main findings of this new platform for creating quantum materials.