An international team led by Miguel M. Ugeda (CIC nanoGUNE) and Michael F. Crommie (UC. Berkeley (USA)) has demonstrated the coexistence of superconductivity and charge density wave (CDW) order in a single layer of NbSe₂, a model transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) metal. The demonstration that a single layer of NbSe₂ is a true 2D superconductor is a breakthrough in the field of 2D materials. Very few 2D superconductors exist in nature, and single-layer NbSe₂ is the first among them that remains a superconductor in its isolated, 2D form without the need of a special substrate. Furthermore, CDW order - spatial modulation of both the electron density and the atomic lattice (see figure below) – has been revealed to be a genuine 2D electronic phenomenon in NbSe₂. This work has been recently reported in Nature Physics.

In an article published and featured as an Editors’ suggestion in Physical Review Letters last week (PRL 115, 187403 (2015)), researchers from the Nanomagnetism group at nanoGUNE in collaboration with a team from the University of Cantabria and the University of Hamburg have reported on a massive increase of magneto-optical effects near the edges of nano-scale disks, where enhancements of over 1000% can be produced.

An interview with Dr. Andreas Berger, nanoGUNE´s research director, has been published on JPhys+, the physics blog from IOP Publishing in the UK. The interview is part of a series of interviews that JPhys+ has conducted during this year with editors of the Journal of Physics Series, and revolves around the research work done by the editors themselves as well as science in general.

Prospero Biosciences will be developing an innovative technology capable of opening up a new field of applications within the mass spectrometry industry. It will enable significant advances to be made in research into biological markers, among other things.

The 5th edition of Nanomercosur is taking place from 6 to 8 October in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and nanoGUNE and its spin-off companies will be represented in the Brokerage event and the nanoBasque space of the exhibition area. 

The Piero Brovetto Award 2015 has been awarded to nanoGUNE's pre-doctoral researcher Nicolò Maccaferri for “his contributions to the fields of nanomagnetism and nanooptics, in particular for the study of the magnetoplasmonic properties of magnetic resonant nanostructures”.

Researchers from the Nanooptics and the Nanodevices groups at CIC nanoGUNE (Basque Country) in collaboration with colleagues at ICFO - The Institute of Photonic Sciences (Catalunya) have imaged how light moves inside an exotic class of matter known as hyperbolic materials. They observed, for the first time, ultraslow pulse propagation and backward propagating waves in deep subwavelength-scale thick slabs of boron nitride – a natural hyperbolic material for infrared light. This work has been funded by the EC Graphene Flagship and was recently reported in Nature Photonics and highlighted as a News&Views.

NanoGUNE offers a nanotechnology introductory course to high-school science and technology teachers in the framework of the Prest Gara program of the Department of Education, Language Policy, and Culture of the Basque Government. The lessons will take place in November and December 2015.

Systems allowing label-free molecular-level detection are expected to have enormous impact on biochemical sciences. Research focuses on materials and technologies based on exploiting the coupling of light with electronic charge oscillations, the so-called localized surface plasmon resonances, in metallic nanostructured antennas. The reason for this focused attention is their suitability for single-molecule sensing, arising from the intrinsically nanoscopic sensing volume and the high sensitivity to the local environment. Usually the metals used to build such nanoantennas are gold or silver. To couple light effectively into localized plasmons with ferromagnetic metals like nickel or cobalt was for a long time considered in practice impossible.

NanoGUNE’s TechTransfer Manager, Miryam Asunción, analyzes the Basque industrial model and its challenges to create a strong, competitive economy based on R&D in strategic areas in International Innovation magazine.