The recently published paper in journal of ACS NANO on Ultrafast Microscopy of Spin-Momentum Locked Surface Plasmon Polaritons is an essential research for designing optical elements to control spin-polarized SPP (surface plasmon polaritons) fields on the nano femto scale. Hrvoje Petek and his colleagues have shown two-photon photoemission electron microscopy images formed by coupling and propagation of longitudinal and transverse components of SPP fields of light. Further, they have also shown the spin-momentum locked SPP wave packets launched with circularly polarized excitation propagate at the same phase and group velocities as for the linearly polarized excitation using time-resolved experiments.
Michael Widom and his colleagues showed what happens at the grain boundaries of one particular alloy of the metals nickel and bismuth that makes it brittle in their paper published in Science. Using advanced electron microscopes, Widom’s collaborators at Lehigh University scrutinized these microscopic grain boundaries at an atomic level. In a "very heroic experimental program" they discovered that when grains met, the bismuth and nickel atoms realigned into lattices to form layered superstructures at the grain boundaries. These superstructures had previously been thought to exist only rarely in some alloys. Finding it at many different boundaries led the team to conclude that these superstructures are probably much more common than many people had thought. 
Owing to high surface to volume ratios and chemical potential, nanoparticles possess unique optical, electrical, and thermal properties, which constitute the basis of novel applications in sensing, catalysis, nanoelectronics, bio-tagging etc. Despite the great advances in the synthesis, the total structure determination of nanoclusters still remains to be a major challenge. Recently Hyung J. Kim and their colleagues have reported the synthesis and crystal structure of a nanocluster composed of 23 silver atoms capped by 8 phosphine and 18 phenylethanethiolate ligands in the journal of Nature Communications.
In the recently published paper in Scientific Reports, Sara A. Majetich and their colleagues have demonstrated the engineering of spin canting across a Magnetic nanoparticles (MNP) via the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI). In this paper, they have shown that strong DMI can lead to magnetic frustration within the shell and cause canting of the net particle moment. These results have illuminated how core/shell nanoparticle systems can be engineered for spin canting across the whole of the particle, rather than solely at the surface.
In the recently accepted paper in Physical Review Letter, Hrvoje Petek and his colleagues investigate the coherent electron transfer from an interface state that forms upon chemisorption of Ag nanoclusters onto graphite to a σ symmetry interlayer band of graphite. Interfacial charge transfer is a fundamental process in heterogeneous and plasmonically enhanced catalysis. The charge transfer, however, is thought to be restrained by an interfacial potential barrier, such as a Schottky barrier at a metal-semiconductor interface. With optical excitation, the interfacial charge transfer can also be efficiently completed by coherent dipole coupling between the donor and acceptor bands. In this study Petek and his colleagues advance the time-resolved multidimensional multiphoton photoemission spectroscopy technique to not only pump the donor band and probe the acceptor band, but also directly image the coherent polarization dynamics between them. They discover a direct resonant electron ... 
Geoff Hutchison is the 2018 Tina and David Bellet Excellence Awardee. The award recognizes his effectiveness and his innovations in teaching. Among many innovations Hutchinson developed Avagadro molecular editor; with that software, he designed projects hat allow Physical Chemistry students to perform quantum mechanical calculations to visualize results/concepts. 
Giannis Mpourmpakis named as one of 25 Emerging Investigators
Giannis Mpourmpakis named as one of 25 researchers around the world as Emerging Investigators in a special issue of the American Chemical Society (ACS) Journal of Chemical & Engineering Data.
Mpourmpakis leads the Computer-Aided Nano and Energy Lab (CANELA) where his group researches the physicochemical properties of nanomaterials with potential applications in diverse nanotechnological areas ranging from energy generation and storage to materials design and catalysis.
Mpourmpakis contributed his paper “Understanding the Gas Phase Chemistry of Alkanes with First-Principles Calculations” to the ACS special issue.
Noa Marom has been selected as the leader of a data science project that's part of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility’s (ALCF) Aurora Early Science Program (ESP). 
An artistic depiction of research from John Keith's lab was featured on the back cover of Royal Society of Chemistry journal Chemical Science. Yasemin Basdogan, a PhD student in Keith’s lab, designed the back cover image, which shows several molecules reacting in a cross-shaped container slowly filling with a liquid.
