Two Postgraduate Interns from École Normale Supérieure Paris
Dr. Grace Morgan (pictured left) of the UCD School of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Professor Peter Hogan of the UCD School of Physics recently completed hosting and supervising two graduate students, Jérémy Scelle (Inorganic Chemistry) and Florian Bolgar (Theoretical Physics), from the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) Paris on six month internships. ENS Paris is one of the most prestigious institutions in the world for graduate study in Science. It has produced twelve Nobel prizewinners and all eight French winners of the Fields Medal for Mathematics. The competition for entry is very severe and this is reflected in the brilliance of these students.Jérémy Scelle worked on fixation and activation of aerial CO2, one of the most pressing problems to face this generation. He started by exploring the ease with which CO2 could be fixed as carbonate in cage-like molecular structures termed cryptates, which house pairs of activating metal ions such as zinc or copper, and he prepared and characterised several such complexes.
However he rapidly established that it was the cages themselves, rather than the metal ions, which were active towards the CO2 and he subsequently developed a protocol for capturing the CO2 and analysing the reaction products after chemical reduction. He conducted his work with a high degree of autonomy and his short six month project will result in two peer reviewed original research articles. His work cer-tainly constitutes an important result in the chemistry of CO2 activation.
Florian Bolgar studied “Equations of Motion of a Spinning Test Particle in General Relativity”. The widely accepted equations derived by A. Papapetrou many years ago are open to criticism. Professor J. L. Synge puts this politely in his classic book Relativity: the general theory saying “I find it difficult to enter into the spirit of the work of Papapetrou”. To critically assess Papapetrou's work requires the development of an alternative approach which can provide a new perspective on the problem. Such an approach was recently constructed by Professor Hogan in collaboration with a brilliant Japanese graduate student visiting UCD, Shinpei Ogawa.
Florian has taken this work further in a tour de force which demonstrates his thoroughness, systematic approach and creativity in working out a strategy to handle a very complex project. His work is presented in a thirty page densely written Report to ENS which supports the original skepticism of Professor Synge. The great triumvirate of Irish Theoretical Physics consists of Hamilton, Synge and O'Raifeartaigh.