Squeezing light into tiny circuits and controlling its flow electrically is a holy grail that has become a realistic scenario thanks to the discovery of graphene. This tantalizing goal is realized by exploiting so-called plasmons, in which electrons and light move together as one coherent wave. Plasmons guided by graphene -a two-dimensional sheet of carbon atoms – are remarkable as they can be confined to length scales of nanometers, one to two hundred times below the wavelength of light. However, until now these plasmons were found to rapidly lose energy, limiting the range over which they could travel.

Wiwat Nuansing, Pre-doctoral Researcher in the Self-Assembly Group at nanoGUNE, received his PhD at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) after the defense of his thesis project on Monday 23 June 2014. He carried out his research work, entitled Electrospinning of Biomolecules, under the supervision of Dr. Alexander Bittner, Ikerbasque Research Professor and Leader of the Self-Assembly group.

The nanoGUNE researcher Pablo Alonso-González has been awarded the RSEF-BBVA Foundation 2014 prize for Physics in the New Researchers in Experimental Physics category. Alonso-González works in this center’s Nanooptics group in Donostia-San Sebastian and his research is currently focussing on the optical properties of graphene at the nanoscale. The researcher was the first to obtain guided light imaging in this material with nanometric precision, and his work was published by the journal Nature.

Wiwat Nuansing, Pre-doctoral Researcher in the Self-Assembly Group at nanoGUNE, received his Doctor Degree at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) after the defense of his thesis project on Monday 23 June 2014. He carried out his research work, entitled Electrospinning of Biomolecules, under the supervision of Dr. Alexander Bittner, Ikerbasque Research Professor and leader of the Self-Assembly group.

CTECHnano is a recently created company, promoted by nanoGUNE in a joint initiative with AVS and Cadinox companies, providing thin-film coating solutions. It is specialized in Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) technology and it has a strong team to answer to customer´s needs.

Estitxu Villamor, Pre-doctoral Researcher at the Nanodevices Group at nanoGUNE, receives her PhD at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) after the defense of her thesis project on Monday 15 December 2014. Her research work, entitled “Injection, Transport, and Manipulation of Pure Spin Currents in Metallic Lateral Spin Valves”, has been developed under the supervision of the Nanodevices Group researcher and Ikerbasque Research Professor Dr. Felix Casanova Fernandez.

NanoGUNE’s Nanobiomechanics Group, led by Ikerbasque Professor Raul Perez-Jimenez, in collaboration with the Department of Biological Sciences of the Columbia University (US) and the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center (US), has tested that mechanical force may help HIV to invade cells. The research has been recently published in ACS Nano (DOI: 10.1021/nn503557w)

NanoGUNE hosts more than 120 experts in nanotechnology and medicine at the 2014 Annual Event & General Assembly of the European Technology Platform on Nanomedicine (ETPN). The ETPN event has taken place on 15 and 16 October 2014, co-organized by the nanoBasque Agency (SPRI) and nanoGUNE, the Basque Nanoscience Cooperative Research Center.

The EVOLGENE project, directed by nanoGUNE’s researcher Raul Perez-Jimenez, has been selected as one of the four “Ideas” that will be supported by the Entrepreneurs Fund of Fundación Repsol. The paleoenzymology project aims at reconstructing ultra-efficient ancestral enzymes for use in industry.