Pecharromán García, Carlos

What's the difference between "too little" and "too much"? This very important question for our everyday life it is also so for Nature. This topic, in addition with all the astonishing changes associated to this subject, is the main research subject of Dr. Carlos Pecharromán (C.P.), at the ICMM-CSIC. According to academic terminology, the precise definition of this topic is contained with the term "percolation", a funny name related with coffee percolators. However, transitions in heterogeneous systems at very specific concentrations have been found not only in coffee beans but everywhere. In particular, when dealing with mixtures one may assume that their properties are a kind of average of all the components, as a function of their relative concentration (rule of mixtures). However, if components interacts between them, this is no so and the composite may exhibit exotic properties at the neighborhood of the transition point concentration, also known as percolation threshold. In this sense, C.P. has been deeply involved in the study of these phenomena. Particularly interesting are the electromagnetic, mechanic and thermal properties, which may couple to induce new physical effects, such as colossal capacity, optical resonances, enhanced structural ceramics, superhard nanometals, etc. However, in "real life", the main obstacle to manufacturing these is the requirement of a homogeneous distribution of components avoiding aggregation. This condition can be considered as the cornerstone for manufacturing "percolative materials", so that it become the main research subline of C.P. In this sense, the interaction with the research group of "Composite Multifunctional Materials" at the ICMM-CSIC has been crucial, because all the members of participate in designing, manufacturing and analyzing both, composite ceramics and nanostrucutured ceramic powders. As a result, many scientific results have been obtained and some of them were successfully transferred to commercial applications. For statistical records, C.P. appears in more than 115 scientific papers (Hirsch factor h>33). Many of them have been supported by 10 of the scientific projects leaded by C.P. Additionally, applied research in collaboration with commercial companies has been held, so that, around 10 patents were submitted for registration and 3 of them are now successfully transferred to companies for manufacturing and selling. It should be also mentioned that C.P. is the scientist supervisor of the IR spectroscopy and ellipsometry lab at the ICMM-CSIC. He helps to characterize or implement non-common spectroscopic measurements techniques to all the scientists of ICMM and CSIC in general.