[Published at www.nanobasque.eu] Technology has evolved so much recently that Basque consumers take for granted that within a few years they will be able to purchase televisions, tablets and computers with ultrafine flexible screens that will be able to be rolled up.

[www.nanobasque.eu] José María Pitarke, Director General of CIC nanoGUNE, has turned the center he runs into a world reference in a very short time, with remarkable successes as the founding of Graphenea, one of the few companies worldwide capable of producing graphene. Pitarke says nanotechnology will help basque companies open new knowledge-intensive industrial sectors

The journal Advanced Functional Materials (Wiley VCH) has highlighted the article published by Q. Yong et al. (Adv. Funct. Mater. 2012, 22, 5157; DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201201791) on the back cover of their current issue. The published work is the result of an international collaboration of nanoGUNE’s Nanomaterials research group, led by Dr. Mato Knez, with four well-reputed research institutions: the Institute of Coal Chemistry (China), the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (Germany), and the École Polytechnique de Montréal (Canada).

The Nanomaterials research group at nanoGUNE, led by Dr. Mato Knez, in collaboration with scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Max Plank Institute of Microstructure Physics, describes in a recent article [ X. Tong et al., Small, 8, 22, 3390 (2012)] the results of a collaborative study on the high-precision synthesis of supported catalytic nanoparticles. The article has been featured on the back cover of the journal SMALL.

In a recent article, published in Physical Review Letters (PRL 109, 177205 (2012)) researchers from the Nanomagnetism group and Electron-Microscopy laboratory at nanoGUNE have reported on the crystallography-driven appearance of positive exchange bias in epitaxial Co/CoO bilayers.

Scientists of the Freie Universität Berlin demonstrate it is possible to use the energy of a moving hydrogen molecule to power up a “mechanical machine”. The work, led by Jose Ignacio Pascual (currently leader of the Nanoimaging Group at nanoGUNE), has been published in the prestigious journal Science (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1227621).

A new nanoimaging method for resolving the interplay between local structure, conductivity, and chemical composition

Starting on 1 September, Nacho Pascual, Professor of Physics at the Free University in Berlin (Germany), has taken on his new responsibility as Ikerbasque Research Professor and Leader of the Nanoimaging Group at nanoGUNE. Nacho’s research is focused on the physics of surfaces and molecules investigated by low temperature scanning tunneling microscopy and related methods.

NanoGUNE’s Nanodevices Group participates in HINTS, a European project that aims at advancing Spintronics by developing new hybrid organic-inorganic (HOI) materials featuring strong and tuneable spin-transfer efficiency at the interfaces.

In a recent article (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature11254) researchers from the nanooptics group at nanoGUNE, in collaboration with researchers from ICFO and IQFR-CSIC, report the launch and detection of propagating optical plasmons in tapered graphene nanostructures using near-field scattering microscopy with infrared excitation light. While optical graphene plasmon resonances had recently been investigated spectroscopically, no experiments so far had directly resolved propagating plasmons in real space. These results pave the way towards graphene-based optical transistors and a plethora of novel nano-optoelectronic devices and functionalities.