Prospective biosensing technologies will need to tackle the grand challenges arising from the global demographic changes. Among the most crucial tasks is the monitoring of food and environmental quality as well as the medical diagnosis. Digital fluidics offers vast advantages in performing these tasks relying on tiny containers with reacting biochemical species and allowing massively parallelized assays and high throughput screening using optical detection approaches. I envision that adding not-optical detectors, which electrically probe the analyte responses, will provide a source of new but complementary information, obtained in a label-free and contactless manner. Hence, these all-electric platforms enable monitoring the kinetics of chemical reactions in lab-on-chip format, as well as take over auxiliary tasks, e.g. indexing, counting of droplets, flow monitoring. In frame of the ERC project SMaRT, my team developed a unique detection platform -millifluidic resonance detector- that inductively couples to an analyte and assesses its physico-chemical properties. The unique selling points are (i) non-invasiveness to analyte, (ii) unnecessity of a transparent fluidic channel, (iii) cost efficiency and (iv) portability. Implementing the input from the partner companies, here I aim to reach the commercialization stage pursuing a number of key milestones, i.e. enhance the screening throughput, realize a platform independent of external electronic devices, provide a temperature stabilization of the response, and develop the app. Societal benefits: We demonstrated that the device provides an access to the metabolic activity of living organisms in droplets. This is way beyond the capabilities of the state-of-the-art optical detection. With this feature, the device can address the issue of increasing antibiotic resistance of bacteria and thus help to optimize the antibiotic policy in hospitals and households and to test new drugs in a time- and cost-efficient way.

Hydrogen energy is treated as a promising renewable green energy source for the worldwide growing energy demands. To produce this sustainable energy, photocatalytic water splitting has attracted wide attentions. However, it suffers from a bottleneck problem originated from the readily mixture of hydrogen and oxygen species, which poses safety issue and undermines yield of hydrogen and oxygen molecules, thus hindering its large-scale practical applications. To tackle this challenge, we plan to design nanocomposite structures based on low-dimensional graphene-like materials for photocatalytic hydrogen production and separation via the theoretical simulations. The unique structural feature endows low-dimensional nanomaterials with excellent physical and chemical properties for catalytic reaction. Importantly, thanks to the selective permeability of protons, the atomically thin graphene-like materials can be used as a sieve to isolate the hydrogen molecules generated by protons reduction from the oxygen species, preventing the serious reverse reaction. Through our project, we aim to establish a rational design principle for the optimal catalysts screening and achieve the atomic-level structural design and manipulation of low-dimensional based materials with excellent performance. In addition, as the proton penetration is the central part to bridge the proton generation process and hydrogen production, we also want to identify the mechanism of proton tunneling and improve the proton penetration rate for the further applications. This Sol2H2 project provides an efficient and imperative approach for both fundamental research and practical application in hydrogen energy.

Cosmic magnetic fields, including those of planets, stars, and galaxies, are being generated by the homogenous dynamo effect in flowing electrically conducting fluids. Once produced, these fields may play an active role in cosmic structure formation by fostering angular momentum transport and mass accretion onto central objects, like protostars or black holes, by means of the magnetorotational instability (MRI). Complementary to the decades-long theoretical research into both effects, the last years have seen great progress in respective experimental investigations. The dynamo effect had been verified in three liquid sodium experiments in Riga, Karlsruhe and Cadarache. The helical and the azimuthal versions of the MRI, as well as the current-driven Tayler instability (TI), were demonstrated at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden - Rossendorf (HZDR). Here, I propose to make three further breakthroughs in this research field. First, I plan to demonstrate dynamo action based on a precession driven flow of liquid sodium in a cylindrical vessel. Besides thermal and compositional buoyancy, precession has been discussed as a complementary power source of the dynamos of the Earth, the ancient Moon, and other cosmic bodies. A second experiment will deal with magnetically triggered flow instabilities of astrophysical importance, with the main focus on attaining standard MRI, and various combinations of MRI and TI. Both experiments will be carried out at the DRESDYN facility at HZDR which has been conceived by me and which will enter into operation in 2019. In contrast to these well-advanced experimental concepts, my third liquid sodium experiment, which aims at showing the magnetic destabilization of rotating flows with radially increasing angular velocity, still requires more numerical simulations and design engineering. Given the comparatively less demanding technical parameters of this set-up, I expect first experimental results within the funding period, too.