Ricerc@Sapienza

Ripening is a crucial step to guarantee the high commercial value of cheddar cheese, one of the dairy products the European Union exports the most. Although several methods have lately been proposed to assess its ageing process from a chemical point of view, the majority of them is not particularly time-efficient and implies destructive analytical tests, thus, exhibiting limitations for, e.g., industrial applications.

Manganese oxides are important geomaterials, used in a large number of applications. For instance, as pigments in art works or in the treatment and removal of heavy metals from drinking water. Particularly, ramsdellite [Mn4+O2] and groutellite [(Mn0.54+,Mn0.53+)O1.5(OH)0.5], because of their 2 × 1 frameworks that enable proton diffusion, are very important cathode materials. Manganese oxides commonly occur as crypto-crystalline and very fine mixtures of different Mn-phases, iron oxides, silicates and carbonates. Thus, proper characterization can be a difficult task using XRPD.

Paints used in street art are modern materials subjected to degradation processes, which are very complex and difficult to predict without taking into account of several factors. This study investigates three outdoor murals in Lazio, – namely “graffiti”, a word now used to indicate a spontaneous street art tendency consisting in images and writings realized by spray paints in public spaces to provoke passersby -with the aim to discover materials application techniques and chemical composition and figure out whether alteration phenomena occurred.

Follicular patterned nodules are sometimes complex to be classified due to ambiguous nuclear features and/or questionable capsular or vascular invasion. In this setting, there is a poor inter-observer concordance even among expert pathologists. Raman spectroscopy was recently used to separate benign and malignant thyroid nodules based on their molecular fingerprint; anyway, some histologically proved follicular adenomas were clustered as having a characteristic profile of malignant lesions.

Identifying the structural rearrangements during photoinduced reactions is a fundamental challenge for understanding from a microscopic perspective the dynamics underlying the functional mechanisms of heme proteins. Here, femtosecond stimulated Raman spectroscopy is applied to follow the ultrafast evolution of two different proteins, each bearing a six-coordinate heme with two amino acid axial ligands.

Photophysical and photochemical processes are often dominated by molecular vibrations in various electronic states. Dissecting the corresponding -often overlapping- spectroscopic signals from different electronic states is a challenge hampering their interpretation. Here we address impulsive stimulated Raman spectroscopy (ISRS), a powerful technique allowing to coherently stimulate and record Raman active modes using broadband pulses.

Wafer-scale integration of reduced graphene oxide with H-terminated Si(1 1 1) surfaces has been accomplished by electrochemical reduction of a thin film of graphene oxide deposited onto Si by drop casting. Two reduction methods have been assayed and carried out in an acetonitrile solution. The initial deposit was subjected either to potential cycling in a 0.1 M TBAPF 6 /CH 3 CN solution at scan rates values of 20 mV s −1 and 50 mV s −1 , or to a potentiostatic polarization at E λ,c = −3 V for 450 s.

In recent years, the synthesis and introduction of Novel Psychoactive Substances (NPS) into the illicit market has reached alarming levels. More than 730 compounds have been identified by the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA). Among the newest NPS, synthetic opioids deserve special attention, in particular fentanyl and its analogues that in 2018 covered more than 70% of the world demand for opioids, with thousands of fatal events in USA.

An analytical approach applied to Vincenzo Pasqualoni's wall paintings in the apse of S. Nicola in Carcere (Rome) is described in this work. The diagnostic campaign was guided following the indications of the restorers, which were supported over all the phases of the restoration, addressing the multi-analytical approach to identify the original pigments palette used by artist, the conservation state and the presence of consolidants materials, by using spectroscopic techniques supported by chemometric analyses.