What’s the matter?

Alwin Mittasch brilliantly stated ‘chemistry without catalysis, would be … a light without brilliance, a bell without sound’. Catalysis is a key technology for modern society, leading to lower product costs, less energy consumption and less pollution. More and more studies tend to indicate that non-conventional processes can be of great benefit to improve the conversions and products selectivity of various catalytic reactions. Our research focuses on the synergy between non-thermal plasma and catalysis for emission control and clean hydrogen production.

At very low temperatures liquid helium enters a new state and becomes a superfluid. Such a fluid behaves very differently to conventional liquids, such as water, that we are all familiar with. In particular, a superfluid can only rotate due to the presence of quantized vortices - miniature tornadoes that are all identical due quantum mechanics. The turbulent state of a superfluid is made up of a messy tangles of these vortices. Our research is looking at how these tangles disappear as the superfluid slows down with the aim of learning about turbulence as a general phenomenon.