Starting on 1 January, Dr. Mato Knez, coming from the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle (Germany), has taken on his new responsibilities as Ikerbasque Research Professor and Leader of the Nanomaterials Group at nanoGUNE.

The Activity Report of CIC nanoGUNE Consolider corresponding to the launching period 2007-2010 is available and can be downloaded from the links below. The full version has been published in English , while summaries are available in Basque and Spanish.

The article “Infrared-Spectroscopic Nanoimaging with a Thermal Source” a collaborative work between researchers of the nanooptics groups and Neaspec GmbH has been awarded the Publication Award 2011 from the Center for NanoScience in Munich for their work on near-field spectroscopy with a thermal source (more info). With this award, remarkably successful cooperation projects as well as outstanding research of an individual or research group are distinguished by CeNS.

As reported in nanotechweb, researchers at nanoGUNE and Chalmers University have discovered a fundamentally new property in nanoscale ferromagnetic nanoantennas – their ability to control the sign of rotation of polarized scattered light. This “Kerr rotation reversal” effect arises from the interplay between magneto-optical and nanoplasmonic properties of such nanoantennas and could be exploited to make novel biochemosensors and in a variety of nanophotonics applications. The work was published in Nano Letters.

The micrograph of a lateral spin valve with integrated dielectric mask, which was obtained by the Ph.D. student Thales de Oliveira from the Self-Assembly Group, has been awarded the second prize of the Raith Micrograph Award 2011. Raith is one of the world-leading suppliers of innovative solutions for nanolithography and nanofabrication.

Dr. Andreas Berger, nanoGUNE Research Director and leader of the nanomagnetism group, co-organizes New Trends and Developments in Nanomagnetism, a symposium that will be celebrated in the framework of the Spring Meeting 2012 of the Materials Research Society. This symposium is focusing on recent trends in nanoscale magnetism and related technologies like advanced characterization techniques and fabrication processes that foster or initiate new development. The goal is to emphasize the strong mutual interaction between current research and present and future technologies.

The new facility, with a processing power of 6220.8 GFLOPS and 1800 GB RAM, will be devoted mainly to nanosystems simulations performed by the newly created Theory Group at nanoGUNE led by Emilio Artacho.

Starting on 1 October, Prof. Emilio Artacho, coming from the University of Cambridge, has taken on his new responsibilities as Ikerbasque Research Professor and Leader of the Theory Group at nanoGUNE.

A new strategy for spontaneous self-assembly of Graphene NanoRibbons (GNRs) using a Single-Walled carbon nanotube (SWNT) as both the reaction vessel and the template for nanoribbon growth has been reported in a recent article by researchers from nanoGUNE and from the Universities of Nottingham and Ulm (A. Chuvilin et al., Nature Materials 10, 687–692 (2011)).

In a recent article (J.Chen at al., Small, doi: 10.1002/smll.201100640) researchers from nanoGUNE have studied the fundamental optical properties of pure nickel nanoantennas. The article has been featured on the cover of the SMALL journal (Volume 7, Issue 16) and on the materials science news site Materials Views. “This study represents a step towards understanding and engineering magnetically controllable optical nanoantennas, which will be extremely useful for many developing technologies including biosensors, lasers, and solar cells”, says Richard Walters in his article “Nickel for Visible-Light Nanoantennas?”.