Month: August 2026

A great colleague told me once “Graphene will never give any application.”

I swallowed these words at that time, unaware of not much applications in general. Apart from LIPSS. These nanostructures with which we filed a EU patent and got Top1% paper in Web Of Science. Yet.

Free-standing graphene is not easy to handle. It is more for science. What about applications? Well, it usually starts with a substrate. But this substrate modifies the properties of the graphene, particularly when this one is small. The smaller, the more difficult it gets to know what’s going on there.

This is where we come into play. Our program is to upscale the results we have obtained in our latest publication. Armed with a 128 core machine and 512 GB of RAM, a few thousands of atoms were prepared by human work, and had led to reveal the effect of temperature on the optical properties (the absorption) but also on something much more interesting: the Fermi levels. That thing which helps to make applications for semiconductor electronics and electron acceleration.

The paper has been published in Journal of Optics, and carry affiliations one from Argentina, and two from Czech Republic.

Looking forward to your questions,
Thibault JY Derrien

Link to the paper: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2040-8986/aea344/pdf

PS: congratulations to Andrés Bertoni and Kristyna Gazdova for having accepted to go through this work together. And to Franco Bonafé and Marika Kurova for the support.

My PhD lab director warned me few years ago that EU investment in the Czech Republic would not last very long, and that I should be too picky to choose a position for returning to France. As usual, I didn’t listen at that time, and even my direct boss had criticized those predictions.

It occurs that these predictions were understated. Situation is much worst than expected. After COVID wave (2019-2022) and collapse of my personal life (2024-…), we have on top of this the arrival of artificial intelligence which pushes numerous people to apply at the same time.

From that point, two main actions can be performed:
– increasing budget of EU (sic),
– decreasing the number of teams that will be funded.

The target did not miss. The success rate from FET/EIC pathfinder went from 12.3% in 2023 to … 2.1 % in 2025… In research, we call this a nightmare. It was generating value, and there was hope for reusing it somewhere useful. What about now? Writing for nothing on personal time, and being not paid for it. Time to leave the boat! Or to be the best… without cheating.

Scamming has never been so easy. While a refractive index is not decently defined for a material that is thinner that optical penetration depth, new sites have appeared proposing some refractive index for 2D materials. Those are unfortunately completely unphysical for the reason mentioned above. At that scale, non-local effects emerge and lead to the weakening of the definition of optical refractive index. Still they are sufficient to define the compression of the wave-function.

A collaborator sent us an ellipsometric measurement of MXene sample. Not only ellipsometry usually mistreat the imaginary parts, but they also provide erroneous data when they are used with samples that are too thin, and too narrow for the measurement spot.