Materials Colloquium 2025, April 3rd

Lecture Hall HCI J6

Office of ETH Sustainability, ETH Zürich

At ETH Zurich, we are working to significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. ETH Net Zero is a task for which we are jointly responsible. The “ETH Net Zero” programme bundles impact-oriented activities for the years 2024 to 2030 to reduce all climate-​relevant emissions on campus as well as in teaching and research at ETH as far as possible.

In this talk, Sebastian Kahlert, the programme manager, will give an overview of activities within the Programme and share ways on how you can contribute and participate.

Laboratory for Fluid Technologies, Technion

Theoretical and experimental work is presented on leveraging the basic physics of liquid-fluid interfaces for fabrication of a wide range of high-quality optical components, without the need for any mechanical processing. The theoretical and experimental aspects of several mechanisms that allow such ‘Fluidic Shaping’ are discussed – from photoactivated Marangoni flows that enable dynamic programmable thin-film deformations, to passive shaping under neutral buoyancy where pinning boundary conditions drive the liquid volume to a desired minimum energy. Finally, our collaboration with NASA on the use of Fluidic Shaping for the creation of future giant space telescopes is discussed, and our zero-g experiments in parabolic flights and on board the international space station are presented.