I enjoyed giving a brief research talk at the WISE meeting earlier this week.

Always interesting to see the very wide scope of sustainable materials science, and to interact with other researchers. Thanks to the organisers for the vibrant meeting!

Registration for the 11th ECA crystallography school is now open!

It will be held in Stockholm on the 28th of June to the 4th of July and will give practical experience of solving and refining data from both powder, single crystal and electron diffraction.

www.ecs11.org

forms.gle/ckyFQoNqRd7d...

Winter weather at last!

Nobel Day is here!
The work on Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025. Research on MOFs has been going on at Stockholm University for twenty years.
Read more about our basic research on MOFs aiming for future solutions. #NobelPrize
www.su.se/english/news...

Really enjoying the Nobel lectures this year! Such a privilege to hear first-hand how it all started.

Beautiful and aperiodic (I think?) wall tiling at Stavanger concert hall @braggyourpattern.bsky.social

Come to this/send people you know to it!

We are doing what we can to make it educational and fun 😊

· beam path = size of class
· inactive molecules = students not taking a piece
· quantitative = the number of absorbed pieces equals class size
· emission spectroscopy = the wrappers "emitted"
· transmittance = the number of pieces left
· multiphoton absorption = someone sneakily taking two pieces

In spectroscopy, we pass radiation with different frequencies through a sample of molecules to learn about molecular size/geometry. In this demonstration, I pass chocolate with different flavours through a class of students to learn about their chocolate preferences.

Chocolate spectroscopy!

To demonstrate spectroscopy to my first-year chemistry class, especially transmittance, I passed around a bag with three types of chocolate bars during the lecture. The students were allowed to take one piece each.

Now you can never pretend that you don't speak Swedish anymore! Well done 😊

Had the fantastic opportunity to demonstrate MOF synthesis for the Swedish news program Aktuellt on SVT!

www.svtplay.se/video/8myQL5...

So extremely much fun to have Andrew Goodwin visiting Stockholm for the day!

Come on, perovskite! Fierce competition here

Vote in Quarterfinal 2 — Mineral Cup Click here to vote in Perovskite vs Tugtupite Photo credit: Domenico Preite and Géry Parent

#MinCup25 Quarterfinal 2: It's #perovskite and its intriguing structure against #tugtupite's collection of optical tricks for this quarterfinal match!

Vote: www.mineralcup.org/2025/vote/r3...
Results: www.mineralcup.org/2025/results...

what would @glazer1.bsky.social vote?

How can you be a solid-state chemist and vote anything but #perovskite ?

I went away a week to ECM and while I wasn't looking, the group decided to double in size!

We now welcome new PhD students Nida and Qingqing and master student Katerina. During the autumn, we are also happy to host the internship students Simon and Mathias.

Refinements are always beautiful (well, almost), but this mixed NTE/PTE* sample probably gives the most appealing set of diffraction that I have ever come across! 🔥 ❄️

*Positive thermal expansion in one direction; negative thermal expansion in the other two

Capillary alignment doesn't always work as planned...

Paper alert! 🌊 🔥 💎 💡 🚿 🧲 ⚡

Arkadiy Simonov, Yevheniia Kholina and I have reviewed (briefly) the stimuli-responsive behaviour of Prussian blue analogues, and you can now read about it in @jmaterchem.rsc.org ☺️

www.doi.org/10.1039/D5TC...

Had a great time at #MC17 organised by @rsc.org! Fun to catch up with friends and colleages, see the wonderful posters and talk, and present our work in progress.

I always enjoy returning to 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 and of course, no Edinburgh visit is complete without a climb up Arthur's seat!

Assistant professor in Materials Chemistry with focus on Computational Materials Design Stockholm University invites applications for an assistant professorship and an associate professorship, WISE fellows, within the framework of the Wallenberg Initiative Material Science for Sustainabi

Chemistry at Stockholm are looking for a computational colleague with a view towards sustainability.

Tenure-track position with a really good start-up package (I know, because I am on the same scheme)!

su.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

I've done plenty of variable-pressure diffraction and (possibly) even more under variable temperature. But this weekend, I got to experience the joys of doing them both at the same time at Diamond. 💎

Please admire our (not entirely random) walk through the PT space...

Glad to see this study out!
www.doi.org/10.1039/D5DT01192B

It is a metastudy of spin crossover in Hofmann complexes, as well as symmetry-mode analysis in ISODISTORT.

Also lots of firsts here: my first last-author paper, first group publication, and first paper on these compounds.

Though I would generally describe myself as a crystallographer, adding some spectroscopy every so often can be a lot of fun!

Too ordered to be a solid solution! It is a superstructure

Colossal Negative Area Compressibility in the Ferroelastic Framework Cu(tcm) Copper(I) tricyanomethanide, Cu(tcm), is a flexible framework material that exhibits the strongest negative area compressibility (NAC) effect ever observed─a remarkable property with potential applications in pressure sensors, artificial muscles, and shock-absorbing devices. Under increasing pressure, Cu(tcm) undergoes two sequential phase transitions (tetragonal → orthorhombic → monoclinic): It has an initial tetragonal structure (I41md) at ambient conditions, but this structure only persists within a narrow pressure range; at 0.12(3) GPa, a pressure-induced ferroelastic phase transition occurs, transforming Cu(tcm) into a low-symmetry orthorhombic structure (Fdd2). The orthorhombic phase has a NAC of −108(14) TPa–1 in the b–c plane between 0.12(3) and 0.93(8) GPa. The NAC behavior is associated with framework hinge motion in a flexible framework with “wine-rack” topology. At 0.93(8) GPa, Cu(tcm) undergoes a second phase transition and transforms into a layered monoclinic structure (Cc) with topologically interpenetrating honeycomb networks. The monoclinic phase of Cu(tcm) exhibits a slight negative linear compressibility (NLC) of −1.1(1) TPa–1 along the a axis and a zero area compressibility of Kac = Ka + Kc = 0.0(4) TPa–1 in the a–c plane over the pressure range of 0.93–2.63 GPa. In contrast to the orthorhombic phase, its mechanism is understood as the pressure-driven dampening of layer “rippling,” which acts to increase the cross-sectional area of the layer at higher hydrostatic pressures. These findings have implications for understanding the underlying mechanism of NAC phenomenon in framework materials.

There is a new world record for negative area compressibility!

A very nice and thorough study, which I had the pleasure of being a small part of 😊

doi.org/10.1021/jacs...

Campus tulips are out!

And of course worth pointing out that they are planted in a Frieze pattern🌷

Happy frog🐸