Welcome to this presentation of CRC 1411. My name is Robin Club Taylor. I am an associate

professor for nanostructure particles here at FAU. Over the next hour or so you're going

to learn through four short video clips and activities about what we do.

We. That is a very important word because what I'm going to describe here is work on

which nearly 50 researchers contribute to in varying extents. Together we are what is

referred to here in Germany as a Sonderforschungsbereich. That's one of those beautiful long German

words made up from a series of shorter ones. Literally it means special research area,

but mercifully the official translation is Collaborative Research Centre.

So what is that you may ask? Well, all scientists and engineers work hard to understand, improve

and protect the world we live in. Nowadays there are many complex problems to solve.

Often these cannot be tackled by just one or two lonely researchers who specialise in

one thing. We need teams who bring in skills in different subjects and who can view a problem

from different angles. In our Collaborative Research Centre we have

researchers with backgrounds in maths, physics and chemistry. You will already know these

subjects well from school. We also have researchers who specialise in material science and process

engineering. These are subjects that are not taught at school. They take bits of maths,

physics and chemistry and connect them together in special ways.

In material science we want to improve the properties of materials. For instance we want

to make a material which is very strong but also very light, or a material from which

you can make an even faster computer. And in process engineering we want to convert

one substance, for instance crude oil, into a wide range of useful things which we need

for products, from cars to detergents to food packaging to medicines. And in the middle

we find another field which is of utmost importance today, data science. That is all about how

we can analyse and learn from structured and unstructured data sets. And that is something

which really links the natural sciences on the left here and engineering on the right.

So these are the skills of our Collaborative Research Centre, but what problem do we want

to solve with them? Let's take a look at the title and logo of the Collaborative Research

Centre. Design of Particulate Products. Maybe the meaning of that is not so intuitive. Perhaps

the logo can help us. What do you see here? Three shapes, each with a different colour,

and behind you can see something that looks like a flowing liquid. Perhaps these shapes

and colours remind you of something. Yes, that's right, building blocks. Except,

if you'd like to play with them, or maybe you played with them in the past, you probably

had a few more. Come to think of it, I'd dreamt of exactly these blocks recently. I

was in my laboratory. My researchers had forced me to finally tidy up my shelf in the storage

cupboard. There I found a mysterious object, a tube. By the way, you can tell that it is

a dream. I'm not wearing a mask. My dream lab had lots of building blocks rather like

the shapes on the tube. I had an urge to pour them into it. At first nothing happened, but

then something remarkable took place. The blocks came out sorted. First the yellow ones,

then the red ones, and finally the blue ones. My dream was a funny coincidence because the

dream, or rather should I say vision, of our collaborative research centre is to do something

quite similar. To take a mixture of things with different properties and to separate

that mixture into the individual parts. Incidentally, how would you separate these three different

blocks? I don't mean by hand, but with some kind of device. Or in other words, what do

you think could be inside the tube in my dream? The three shapes in our logo also have three

different colours, and colour is something which is also very important in our collaborative

research centre. That is because colour is the property we would like to improve by separating

a mixture. You might find that a little bit strange. You are probably familiar with mixing

colours together to get new ones. But we want to separate them. For example, we would like

to extract a strong yellow colour from a weak yellow. That sounds rather strange. How can

this weak yellow colour contain a strong colour? To understand that we first need to look at