Research

Nuclear power plays a crucial role in a sustainable future due to its ability to generate large amounts of low-carbon electricity, which is essential for mitigating climate change. Unlike fossil fuels, nuclear energy produces minimal greenhouse gas emissions, helping to reduce the overall carbon footprint of power generation. However, the main concern is the inevitable accumulation of nuclear waste, and this needs to be properly addressed. With the anticipated increase in the number of operating nuclear power plants around the world it is essential to develop new materials and technologies for nuclear waste management. In our latest study we have developed and tested new radiografted materials as potential ^110mAg adsorbents. This silver radionuclide is a very elusive contaminant in the pressurized water reactors (PWR) and represents a major problem for normal operation. Additionally, ^110mAg possess a significant danger to the environment, if not removed completely from the PWR wastewater.

In this study, we explore and demonstrate a rapid method for actinic patterned EUV mask inspection based on a deep neural network (DNN) architecture which exploits a-priori information of the photomask sample. We aim to achieve fast, high-quality image reconstruction of an EUV mask by using comparatively few diffraction patterns in a formalism consistent with the ptychography approach.
We tested our prior-primed DNN method on both synthetic and experimental data, demonstrating that the sample can be reconstructed fast and with high fidelity, allowing us to map out the mask defects down to a size of about 40 nm. 

Radioligands targeting the prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) are currently used in the clinics to treat patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. Continuous investigations are, nevertheless, conducted to design new small molecule-based radioligands and improve their respective pharmacokinetic properties. Various strategies have been devised to reasonably prolong the blood circulation, which would result into enhanced tumor accumulation and radiation dose delivered to eliminate the cancer cells. The goal of this study was to investigate the influence of the incorporation of a transthyretin binder (TB-01) in the tumor uptake of the resultant PSMA-targeted radioligand.