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Scientific programme
Nature builds dynamic, responsive systems across every length and time scale. We study how it does so at the atomic level, and borrow the mechanism to make sustainable materials and devices.
Approach
We treat the surface as the skin of a material — the way it communicates and interfaces with its environment — and we nanostructure it to create atomically tailored interfaces.
Two application areas drive the programme, both of urgent technological relevance: energy conversion, where the efficiency of a catalyst is decided in the first few atomic layers; and smart antimicrobial interfaces, where resistance has to be designed into the material rather than dosed onto it.
Reaching that scale requires seeing it. Our groups combine cutting-edge scanning probe microscopy with solid-state spectroscopy, which lets us follow kinetic processes in situ — under liquid flow and under potential control — rather than inferring them from a material before and after. Watching chemistry happen, instead of reconstructing it, is the methodological commitment that runs through everything we do.
Themes
Designing interfaces that resist microbial colonisation through their structure and chemistry rather than through the continuous release of biocides. The aim is materials for clinical, food-processing and industrial settings that stay effective without contributing to antimicrobial resistance.
Building catalytic interfaces that convert light, water and carbon dioxide into fuels and chemical feedstocks. We study the operating catalyst under realistic conditions to understand which structural motifs actually carry the reaction — and which only appear to.
Molecular handedness and electron spin govern recognition and reactivity at surfaces with submolecular precision. Understanding and controlling that coupling opens routes to enantioselective catalysis and to spin-controlled electrochemistry.
Supramolecular systems that bind, release and change state in response to a stimulus. We study self-assembly and switching at the solid–liquid interface as a route to responsive coatings, sensing layers and reconfigurable surfaces.
Research groups
Each group at Helvetia is scientifically independent. The institute hosts, employs and administers — it does not direct.
Founding group · since 2024
Principal Investigator: Dr. Magalí Lingenfelder
The founding group of the institute, and the origin of its scientific programme. The lab elucidates chemical processes at the solid–liquid interface, with particular focus on spin-controlled and dynamic (bio)molecular recognition, and uses that understanding to design new materials.
Its work has been supported by Horizon 2020, the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation, CONICET, MinCyT, the Max Planck Society and the US Department of Energy.
Open call
We are recruiting an established principal investigator to lead the institute’s second group. We are open on topic, provided the science is excellent and there is genuine intellectual overlap with interface, materials, energy or quantum research.
The practical requirement is independent funding of CHF 1 million or more, secured or realistically incoming.
Facilities
Frontier surface science is instrument-limited. Pooling equipment, method development and technical expertise across groups is the single largest practical advantage the institute offers.
Exploring fundamental concepts that connect nanoscale phenomena with applicable interfaces, to address urgent technological and societal problems — and mentoring scientists in an environment built on integrity and creativity.
Collaborate
We work with academic collaborators and industrial partners on questions that need atomic-scale answers. Tell us what you are up against.
