More than 12 million PLN for research projects have been awarded to five researchers from WUST under the Maestro and Sonata Bis competitions organised by the National Centre for Science. The research concerns areas of science including perovskites, active enzymes, and artificial intelligence.

Targeting experienced scientists, Maestro is a competition for research projects aimed at carrying out pioneering, and also interdisciplinary, research that is important for the development of science and reaching beyond the current state of knowledge, which may result in scientific discoveries.

Unique properties of perovskites

Under this programme, a grant for almost 4 million PLN was awarded to University Professor Paulina Płochocka-Maude, PhD. from the Faculty of Fundamental Problems of Technology, who will conduct a project entitled "SERENADE – Soft perovskites – a new paradigm in semiconductor engineering".

In recent years, Perovskite semiconductors have been some of the most intensively researched materials. This is due to their unique properties, which make them extremely promising for photovoltaic and light emitter applications. Over ten years, photovoltaic cells using perovskites as the active area have reached efficiencies comparable to those based on the silicon technology, which has been in development for more than 50 years. Additionally, perovskites can be synthesised using wet chemistry methods, which significantly reduces their production costs. This technology could be much cheaper than the current photovoltaic manufacturing technology.

Another unique feature of perovskite semiconductors is that they are several times softer than silicon or gallium arsenide, the semiconductors commonly used today. The “softness" of materials is seldom coupled with their good electro-optical properties, which is what makes perovskites unique.

– In the project, we want to focus on this deformability of perovskites and how to take advantage of it to modify their properties. The deformation of perovskites affects the arrangement of atoms within their lattice and thus changes their properties. As a result of stress or compression, it’s possible to control their absorption and emission properties, i.e. what colour they are or what colour light they emit – explains Professor Paulina Płochocka-Maude. – The softness of perovskites means that the degree of their properties’ modification by external factors is much greater than as was the case with previously known semiconductors – she adds.

The project will be carried out under a consortium arrangement established with the Włodzimierz Trzebiatowski Institute of Low Temperatures and Structural Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Prof. Paulina Płochocka-Maude works at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Toulouse. She has been cooperating with Wrocław University of Science and Technology for several years, and since May 2019, she has been officially employed at WUST, where she is conducting her projects.

The Sonata Bis competition focuses on research projects aimed at setting up a new research team. The competition’s grants can be awarded only to individuals who achieved their doctoral degree 5 to 12 years before applying for the subsidy. Four of our researchers have received research grants under this programme.

Researching active enzymes

Paulina Kasperkiewicz-Wasilewska, PhD, Eng. from the Faculty of Chemistry will carry out a project named “Serine protease-dependent heterogeneity of neutrophils”, with funds amounting to almost 3 million PLN.  The research will be conducted jointly with scientists from the Jagiellonian University.

– The heterogeneity of blood cell populations is as natural as the diversity of the human population. Cells perform the same functions, but some contain more of certain factors than others, making them better at defending the body against pathogens, while other cells contain more of another factor and are involved in cancerous diseases. This heterogeneity can be compared to the human population, where very tall people have a natural predisposition to play basketball, and people with long fingers are better predisposed to play the piano – explains Paulina Kasperkiewicz-Wasilewska, PhD, who works at WUST’s Department of Biological Chemistry and Bioimaging.

The scientist explains that white blood cells are equipped with many factors to perform these diverse functions. In her work, the chemist will focus on the study of one of these, namely active enzymes. – Why enzymes? They are the key effector factors in cells – she adds.

The project’s main task is to study the dependence of blood cell heterogeneity on active enzymes and indicate the difference in the profile of a healthy patient compared to an ill one. – We will study neutrophils infiltrated into cancerous tumours, so-called TAN's (Tumor-Associated Neutrophils), using several models of haematological cancers and solid tumours, i.e. breast or lung cancer – explains the project leader.

The research is an interdisciplinary project as it requires the knowledge of different fields. It will therefore be carried out in cooperation with specialists in immunology and oncology from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow.

How to design a school timetable effectively?

The funding of 1,426,800 PLN has been awarded to Michał Przewoźniczek, PhD, Eng. from the Faculty of Computer Science and Management. His research concerns the development of new artificial intelligence tools.

– We want to develop new, more efficient mechanisms based on searching links between genes in evolutionary algorithms designed for solving multi-objective (MO) and many-objective (MOO) problems – explains Michał Przewoźniczek, PhD. from WUST’s Department of Computational Intelligence.

He adds that such problems often occur in practice, and providing good quality solutions to them can make a significant difference in everyone's daily lives. – It’s about tasks such as designing a timetable in a school, a production schedule in a factory, a set of routes to be used by public transport in a modern city, or even... allocating specific places at tables for wedding guests – explains the researcher.

A particular difficulty is that usually when having multiple criteria for evaluating a solution, improving the value of one criterion results in the deterioration in the quality of the other ones.

– Evolutionary methods that solve MO/MOO problems rarely use problem structure decomposition, which is a key element of the best-established methods designed for single-objective optimisation. This is why we want to propose new methods that achieve much higher efficiency than current optimisers by using decomposition – says the grant leader.

He will conduct the research together with his PhD student Marcin Komarnicki from the Faculty of Computer Science and Management, who is co-author of the project entitled "The development of evolutionary methods dedicated to multi-objective and many-objective optimisation using gene linkage search techniques".

New numerical methods

University Professor Łukasz Plociniczak, PhD, Dsc, Eng. from the university's Faculty of Mathematics, has received a grant of more than 1 million PLN for the project "Non-linear algorithms non-local in time and space". It aims to develop new numerical methods for solving non-local problems and closely analyse their convergence and stability.

– In recent years, scientists from all over the world have discovered that many phenomena in physics, medicine, or economics occur in a non-local manner. This means that their state at a given moment and a given point in space may depend on their entire history and on what is happening in distant regions of space. Besides, the evolution of the process under study may be strongly dependent on its state. This leads to so-called non-linearities – explains the researcher. – For instance, in some modern porous materials, the moisture content of the medium depends significantly on both the past evolution of the waterfront and the degree of the material’s heterogeneity – he adds.

Non-local differential equations are important mathematical models of the above phenomena. Their numerical solutions are much more time-consuming and complex than those of their local (classic) cousins.

Improved quality in producing single-photon sources

In his project "Hybrid structures of III-V semiconductors and transition metal dichalcogenides for single-photon emitters", Michał Baranowski, PhD, Eng. from the Department of Fundamental Problems of Technology wants to solve two problems using monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides deposited on nanostructures of III-V semiconductors. The project has received funding of 2.6 million PLN.

– Over the five years of the project’s time-frame, we hope to combine mature semiconductor nanostructure production technologies with the fascinating properties of transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers and thus provide a new quality in the production of single-photon sources – Michał Baranowski, PhD, Eng.

Recently, we’ve been continuously able to observe a growing interest in non-classic quantum light sources, i.e. emitters that can emit only one photon per excitation cycle. Most single-photon emitters are based on point defects or quantum dots buried in the semiconductor/insulator matrix, which makes efficient photon extraction difficult due to the phenomenon of total internal reflection. Also, such emitters are randomly distributed in the matrix, making the production of the final device difficult to scale.

Defects in transition metal dichalcogenides behave like single-photon emitters, and because they are two-dimensional, the problem of photon extraction is absent. In addition, defects can be created deterministically by locally controlling the flake stress with the substrate structure.