Research News

An international collaboration between researchers from Denmark, Spain and Austria, which includes the postdoctoral researcher at UPC, Juan Sánchez Baena, as first author, shows that heating does not always melt a solid material. Their discovery reveals how increasing the temperature of an ultracold quantum fluid can trigger its phase transition to a solid state.

Maria Teresa Alonso defended her thesis co-supervised by Jaume Sanz Subirana and Adrià Rovira Gracía on May 31 at the North Campus in Barcelona. Titled Galileo Broadcast Ephemeris and Clock Errors, and Observed Fault Probabilities for ARAIM. The thesis presents the characterization of the orbit and clock errors of the satellites of the European positioning system Galileo, and determines, observationally, their probabilities of failure.

Cristhian Timoté defended his thesis co-supervised by Dr. Guillermo González-Casado and Dr. Miquel Escudero on March 27 at the North Campus. Entitled "Contributions to real-time monitoring of the ionosphere using GNSS signals", the thesis presents the set of algorithms implemented in real time to be able to model the ionosphere and offer high-precision corrections to GNSS users

Jonathan Ordóñez defended his thesis coadvised by Jose Eduardo García and Michel Venet on the 24th of March in Campus Nord. Entitled "Theoretical and experimental investigation on the visible-light controlled functional properties in charged domain wall ferroelectrics", the thesis focuses in overcome some questions that remained to be solved concerning light-activated phenomena in ferroelectric materials.

Marc Melgosa defended his thesis co-supervised by Dr. Xavier Prats and Dr. Andrija Vidosavljevic on March 22, 2023 at the Baix Llobregat Campus. Entitled "Enhanced Air Traffic Flow and Capacity Management under Trajectory Based Operations considering traffic Complexity", the thesis presents a new operational concept that integrates demand and capacity management in the same optimization problem, uses complexity metrics (in instead of the number of arrivals) to measure traffic and takes into account airspace user preferences allowing the possibility of using alternative trajectories to avoid airspace congestion

An international scientific team, in which Yuri Cavecchi, from the physics department of the UPC has participated, and led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has found a neutron star that steals matter from a companion star in a violent and unstable. This process, previously only observed in black holes. The study is published in the journal Nature.

A team of researchers from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain), Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Brazil) and Stanford University (USA) performed advanced quantum atomistic simulations to assess the Bose-Einstein condensate fraction of solid helium at zero temperature containing dislocations, a defective system that previously had been proposed to be “supersolid”