Good news today! :) Our paper "Influence of Gold Additive on the Stability and Phase Transformation of Titanate Nanostructures" was accepted for publication in RSC Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. The first author is Péter Pusztai and the paper itself was expertly managed by Prof. János Kiss. The revision process in this case proved to be exceptionally fruitful because the referee opinions contained valuable criticism and truly interesting questions. In out attempt to answer these questions we were able to suggest a new mechanism that explains the surprising difference between the thermal behavior of H-form and Au-exchanged trititanate nanotubes and nanowires. While gold appears to catalyze the transformation of Au decorated nanotubes into anatase, it actually prevents the same process from happening in Au decorated nanowires. The explanation is nice, the XPS results are particularly nice, so please go ahead and read the paper when available! :)

All members of the MTA-SZTE "Lendület" Porous Nanocomposites Research Group have contributed actively to the success of the 6th Szeged International Workshop on Advances in Nanoscience (SIWAN 2014). I believe the meeting went quite well. The scientific level was high (as indicated by the kind feedback of some colleagues), there were only minor technical issues and most importantly, SIWAN managed to fulfill its original purposes:

• to introduce top-level international nano science research to young Hungarian scientists and Szeged undergraduate students, and
  
• to create a casual, warm atmosphere for its participants and thus promote informal discussions and help in establishing new contacts.

It was a very nice gesture from Prof. Maurizio Prato (Trieste, Italy) to commemorate the first SIWAN in one slide. He was here with us back then and he came again now to see the small workshop evolve into a conference. I'm proud of ourselves, although I'm sad that the old logo has been replaced by the new professional graphics. The old one was one of my earliest attempts at POV-Ray :-)

SIWAN would not have been possible without the help of many people who did not get so much spotlight as Zoltán Kónya and myself. First and foremost, Erna Sári from AKCongress and her team ensured that all administrative and financial issues are taken care of. We enjoyed the support of the director of Akadémiai Kiadó, Balázs Réffy and were assisted by our team of young colleagues who made sure that both sessions run smoothly, are documented well and that everyone gets assistance as soon as s/he asks for it. Thank you all!

Just for the record, let us keep a copy of the program of SIWAN 6 accessible here :)

Last week was busy here at Szeged. Besides the VOCSENSOR project meeting and SIWAN 2014, our paper "Thermal decomposition and reconstruction of CaFe-layered double hydroxide studied by X-ray diffractometry and 57Fe Mössbauer spectroscopy" was accepted for publication in Journal of Molecular Structure. This paper summarizes a large body of experimental work from the Ph.D. thesis of Valéria Bugris. The paper was expertly managed by Dr. István Pálinkó. Congratulations to all co-authors! :)