Announcements

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Yanlin Song has been appointed Associate Editor of Materials (ISSN: 1996-1944). We wish Prof. Dr. Yanlin Song every success in his new position, and we look forward to his contributions to the journal.

Name: Prof. Dr. Yanlin Song
Affiliation: Key Laboratory of Green Printing, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
Homepage: http://ylsong.iccas.ac.cn/
Interests: nanomaterials and green printing technology; printed electrics and photonics; fabrication and applications of photonic crystals

Prof. Dr. Yanlin Song has been a Full Professor at the Institute of Chemistry Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICCAS) since 2001. His research interests include green printing materials and technology, polymer photonic crystals, and optic/electric device fabrication. He has published more than 600 academic papers in peer-reviewed journals, has an h-index of 100, and has been granted more than 140 patents. He has proposed and developed nano-green printing as well as micro/nanomanufacturing technology, breaking through fundamental challenges, such as the coffee ring effect, Rayleigh instability, and the Marangoni effect, that affect printing accuracy. He has printed wearable electronics, solar cells, ultrasensitive biosensing chips, and other functional devices. He has won numerous academic awards, including the Second Prize of National Natural Science Award in 2005 and 2008, the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars in 2006, the First Prize of Beijing Science and Technology Award in 2016, the IEC 1906 Award in 2019, and National Innovation Competition Award in 2023.

We are honored that we have the opportunity to introduce Prof. Dr. Yanlin Song to our editorial team, and we are confident that, with the guidance of our new Associate Editor, we will continue to improve the reputation and quality of Materials (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/materials).

The 17th European Congress and Exhibition on Advanced Materials and Processes (FEMS EUROMAT 2023) will be held from 3 to 7 September 2023, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The conference is organized by the German Materials Society.

Areas include the following:

• Functional materials;
• Structural materials;
• Processing;
• Characterization and modeling;
• Energy and transportation;
• Materials for healthcare;
• Education, strategy, and technology transfer;
• Materials for circularity and sustainability.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Materials;
• Energies;
• Nanomaterials;
• C;
• Crystals;
• Solids;
• Batteries;
• Polymers;
• JFB.

If you are attending this conference, please feel free to start an online conversation with us. Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person at booth #B-20 and answering any questions that you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit the following link: https://euromat2023.com/congress/welcome-address.

MDPI will be attending the 6th International Conference on Perovskite Solar Cell and Optoelectronics (PSCO 2023) in Oxford, UK, which will take place from 18 to 20 September 2023. The program will include a combination of invited talks, contributing talks and poster presentations in a meeting that will bring a broad spectrum of the community together to discuss and share knowledge on the latest advances in perovskite materials, devices and photophysical and optoelectronic properties and phenomena.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Electronics;
• Photonics;
• Energies;
• Materials;
• Nanoenergy Advances.

If you are attending the conference, please visit our booth. Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person and answering any questions that you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit the following link: https://www.psco-conference.org/.

Conference: 18th International Conference on Molecule-Based Magnets (ICMM2023)
Date: 10–14 September 2023
Location: Nanjing, China

MDPI will be attending ICMM 2023 as an exhibitor. We welcome researchers from different backgrounds to visit and share their latest ideas with us.

ICMM is a grand ceremony for all researchers working in related areas all over the world, and is the largest conference covering all topics in molecule-based magnets. The topics that will be covered at the conference will include molecular nanomagnets, spin-crossover materials, long-range ordering magnets, multifunctional and/or switchable materials, nanostructured magnetic materials, molecular spintronics, and devices, as well as other hot topics related to molecule-based magnetism. The conference is organized by the State Key Laboratory of Coordination Chemistry and the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Magnetochemistry;
• Chemistry;
• Crystals;
• Inorganics;
• Magnetism;
• Materials;
• Metals;
• Molecules;
• Physics;
• Quantum Reports;
• Symmetry.

If you are planning to attend this conference, please do not hesitate to start an online conversation with us. Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person and answering any questions that you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit the following website: https://icmm2023.nju.edu.cn/.

The following paper was published in Materials (ISSN: 1996-1944), providing possible breakthroughs regarding T_c calculations for 11-type and 111-type iron-based superconductors:

“Preliminary T_c Calculations for Iron-Based Superconductivity in NaFeAs, LiFeAs, FeSe and Nanostructured FeSe/SrTiO₃ Superconductors”
by Chi Ho Wong and Rolf Lortz
Materials 2023, 16(13), 4674; https://doi.org/10.3390/ma16134674
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1944/16/13/4674

Our model has successfully shown that when all relevant conduction electrons interact with local Fe moments in iron-based superconductors, the coexistence of superconductivity with local fluctuating antiferromagnetism together with the induced xy potential can lead to an enormous increase in the electron–phonon coupling, which is sufficient to predict the high T_c values in the studied iron-based superconductors. By applying the model to monolayered FeSe on a SrTiO₃ substrate, we have concluded that the interfacial phonons are of major importance to explain the high-temperature superconductivity.

Figure 1. The theoretical and experimental T_c values of (a) NaFeAs, (b) LiFeAs and (c) FeSe are consistent. (d) A FeSe monolayered film is deposited on a SrTiO₃ monolayer to form a composite. The offset in theoretical and experimental T_c is 100-91=9K only.

High-temperature superconductors are important because they allow for the development of more efficient and powerful technologies. They can be used to create devices with zero electrical resistance, enabling them to conduct electricity without any loss of energy. This makes them ideal for applications such as power transmission lines, magnetic levitation trains, and high-speed computing systems. High-temperature superconductors also have potential applications in medical imaging and quantum computing. One of the families of high-temperature superconductors, iron-based superconductors, has been an area of intense research since its discovery in 2008. The superconducting transition temperature observed in FeSe/SrTiO₃ films has been found to be up to 100K. Despite significant advances in understanding the physical properties of these materials, no theoretical calculation of the superconducting transition temperature (T_c) of iron-based superconductors has been successful so far. This is mainly due to the complexity of the electronic structure and strong electron–electron correlations that are present in these materials. Nevertheless, a team of researchers (Prof. Chi Ho Wong^1,2 and Prof. Rolf Lortz¹) from the ¹Department of Physics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the ²Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University have developed a new model that can calculate the T_c of several iron-based superconductors (bulk FeSe, LiFeAs, NaFeAs and FeSe/SrTiO₃ film) with good accuracy; the model was published in Materials. The model may make a significant contribution to the comprehension of superconductivity in iron-based materials.

Prof. Wong and Prof. Lortz have recently announced a major breakthrough in the T_c calculation of iron-based superconductors (IBSC) for bulk LiFeAs, NaFeAs, FeSe and FeSe/SrTiO₃ film. Although antiferromagnetic-enhanced electron–phonon coupling on the Fermi surface cannot produce such high T_c values, they have created the two-channel model to call out the hidden induced xy potential originating from the out-of-plane phonon under antiferromagnetic fluctuations (abbreviated as the Coh factor), in order to refine the calculation of electron–phonon coupling. Furthermore, they have based their model on ARPES data to consider all relevant electrons participating in iron-based superconductivity (abbreviated as the ARPES factor) instead of solely focusing on the interactions at the Fermi level. In the experimental proof of ARPES, all the relevant electrons in the studied superconductors located in the energy range between E_F-E_Debye and E_F are taken into consideration, with E_F being the Fermi energy and E_Debye being the Debye Energy. The ARPES factor and Coh factor have made a big step to reduce the discrepancy between theoretical and experimental T_c values of the aforementioned materials. This approach allows their model to reasonably predict the superconducting transition temperatures of bulk LiFeAs, NaFeAs, FeSe as a function of pressure in Figure 1a–c. However, the team was able to calculate the highest-T_c IBSC material, FeSe/SrTiO₃ (~100K), only if the effect of interfacial phonon between FeSe and SrTiO₃ is considered in Figure 1d, which connects phonons to iron-based superconductivity indirectly. The team is now upgrading the model by considering momentum dependence on the superconducting gap and spin-orbital coupling, etc., and checking whether the model is one of the missing puzzles in a unified theory of iron-based superconductors or not.

Conference: 15th European Congress on Catalysis (EuropaCat 2023)
Date: 27 August–1 September 2023
Location: Prague, Czech Republic

MDPI will be attending EuropaCat 2023 as an exhibitor. We welcome researchers from different backgrounds to visit and share their latest ideas with us.

EuropaCat has become a traditional meeting place for scientists and researchers from academia and industry who are based all over Europe. Consequently, it has developed into a forum to discuss important challenges in the field of catalysis and the related industrial areas and beyond. The conference is jointly organized by the catalysis societies of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Molecules;
• Catalysts;
• Applied Sciences;
• Chemistry;
• Materials;
• Nanomaterials;
• Photochem;
• Separations;
• Symmetry.

If you are planning to attend this conference, please do not hesitate to start an online conversation with us. Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person and answering any questions that you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit the following website: https://www.europacat2023.cz/.

MDPI will attend the 4th National Conference on Inorganic Membranes. This conference hosted by the Catalysis Professional Committee of the Chinese Chemical Society and Nanjing University of Technology will be held in Nanjing from 11 to 14 August 2023.

The conference aims to fully display, exchange, and summarize the latest achievements in the field of academic research on inorganic membranes in China, and promote the development of the inorganic membranes industry and the improvement of academic levels. The theme of this conference is “Low-Carbon Process Reengineering with Membrane Technology as the Core”. The conference topics cover membrane material types, application fields and technical fields.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Membranes;
• Molecules;
• Materials.

If you plan on attending this conference, please feel free to stop by our booth (#8) and start a conversation with us. Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person and answering any questions that you may have. For more information about the conference, please visit https://ncim2023.scimeeting.cn/cn/web/index/19014.

MDPI will be attending the 9th International Discussion Meeting on Relaxations in Complex Systems, organized by the University of Tokyo, held from 12 to 18 August 2023, in Chiba, Japan.

The conference topics include the following:

• Polymer Nanocomposites and MOF;
• Photonic Disordered Materials;
• Network and Inorganic Glasses;
• Interrelation between T and V in Dynamics of Liquids and Polymers;
• Colloidal Systems and Dispersions;
• Information Science and Machine Learning;
• Linear and Nonlinear Dielectric Dynamics.

During this conference, MDPI (at booth #Ex-14) will welcome researchers from different backgrounds to visit and share their latest views and research with us.

The following MDPI journals will be represented:

• Materials;
• Polymers;
• Coatings;
• Membranes;
• Computation.

If you are attending this conference, please feel free to start an online conversation with us. Our delegates look forward to meeting you in person at booth #Ex-14 and answering any questions that you may have.

For more information about the conference, please visit the following link: https://9idmrcs.jp/index.html.

On 26 July 2023, MDPI and the journal Materials (ISSN: 1996-1944) organized the webinar on materials titled “Nanoarchitectonics of Functional Materials”. The webinar focused on functional materials, discussing how to use nanostructure technology to achieve specific properties and functions of materials, and enabling a better understanding of the cutting-edge trends in material design through an in-depth understanding of the principles and applications of nanostructure technology.

Dr. Fabien Grasset first explained the latest progress in nano-architecture. Prof. Dr. David Leong made a report on nanomaterials-induced endothelial leakiness. Prof. Dr. Jung Ho Kim focused on nanoarchitectonics of lithium-ion pathways through pores in a carbon framework and proposed that the structure is helpful for improving the storage capability and reversibility of lithium metal anode. Finally, Prof. Dr. Katsuhiko Ariga made a summary statement of the meeting.

Please note that this webinar is associated with three Special Issues in the Materials journal:

• “Electrochemical Synthesis of Nanostructured Semiconductors”
  Submission deadline: 10 September 2023

• “Functional Nanomaterials for a Better Life (Volume II)”
  Submission deadline: 10 October 2023

• “Materials Nanoarchitectonics for Membranes, Surfaces, Self-Assembly, and Biomimetics”
  Submission deadline: 20 January 2024

You can watch the recorded webinar below:

Webinar Chair and Keynote Speakers:

• Dr. Fabien Grasset, ¹ Rennes Institute for Chemical Sciences, CNRS, France; ² LINK, NIMS-Saint-Gobain-CNRS, Japan;
• Prof. Dr. Katsuhiko Ariga, ¹ WPI Research Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA), National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), Japan; ² Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Japan;
• Prof. Dr. David Leong, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore;
• Prof. Dr. Jung Ho Kim, Institute for Superconducting and Electronic Materials, Australian Institute for Innovative Materials (AIIM), University of Wollongong, Australia.