Hello, world! I am Daniel, a PhD student at the ESISNA group. I have been interested in science and how nature works since I was a child. That’s the reason why I decided to study Physics at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. My work at ESISNA group started in my fourth year, 2018-2019, with a JAE Intro internship.
After finishing my master’s degree at the same university, I was granted an FPU contract/internship to write a thesis about the on-surface chemistry of alkanes (e.g. the gas of your car or the fatty oils of your burger) on transition metals, like cooper and platinum. My goal is to achieve and understand the cyclisation and aromatisation of these molecules, forming those fantastic hexagons that organic chemists all around the globe love and worship. Ultra-high vacuum techniques, such as Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy or X-Ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy, are a crucial part of my experiments, where all the magic happens at the surface.
