The Ministry of Science and Innovation of the Spanish Government has awarded 1.5 million euros to nanoGUNE aiming to bring principally new Focused Ion Beam technologies to the Basque Country. The equipment will be a state-of-the-art focused ion beam electron microscope, which will combine features that are not normally present together in a single instrument: an extensive set of detectors for materials science applications; the large volume removal option targeting for batteries sector and industry; and a cryo option, typically dedicated to biological applications. This combination of features in a single instrument will be unique in Europe and will also provide new research opportunities in materials science related to low-temperature physics and in biological sciences related to cryo-cell tomography. This instrument will be the base for a common research facility, one of a few in Europe.

The Spanish Foundation for the Promotion of Research into Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (FUNDELA) has awarded CIC nanoGUNE, a project to conduct research into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), in collaboration with the ALS laboratory of the 12 de Octubre Hospital - “i+12” and the Genetics Service of the Ramón y Cajal-IRYCIS Hospital, belonging to the Center for Biomedical Research Network on Rare Diseases (CIBERER).

BioTech Foods is a start-up company founded in 2017 with the mission of producing and commercializing cultured meat. It was launched at nanoGUNE under the scientific guidance of Dr. Mercedes Vila, former scientific director of the start-up company  Ctech-nano, also at nanoGUNE. 

Emilio Artacho, leader of the Theory Group of nanoGUNE, has recently been named APS Fellow by the American Physical Society (APS) for developing the linear scaling SIESTA method and for pioneering work on developing and applying methods to study energy dissipation of swift ions in solids.

Through the signing of a new collaboration agreement seventeen Basque organizations are joining forces around the Emakumeak Zientzian project, thus declaring their commitment to the objectives of the initiative: to make the activity of women in science visible, to break with the typically male roles attributed to scientific and technical activities, and to encourage girls and adolescents to choose scientific careers. With these objectives in mind, the organizations are coming together to run a joint program of activities to mark International Day of Women and Girls in Science, which is held every year on February 11.

In a recent article published in Physical Review Letters (Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 147201 (2021)), researchers from the Nanomagnetism group at nanoGUNE in collaboration with scientists from the US and Colombia have demonstrated that it is possible to design thermodynamic critical exponents a la carte and override the universality of phase transition behavior, which was previously understood to be only dependent on the dimensionality of sample and order parameter.

An international team of researchers, including members of nanoGUNE's Nanooptics group, publish in “Science Advances” the grounds for the realization of nanodevices that, based on the manipulation of light at the nanoscale, promise the development of extraordinarily sensitive biosensors. The researchers also designed gold nanoantennas that allow obtaining extremely small (600.000 times smaller than the size of a grain of sugar) and bright focal spots. This achievement opens new avenues for the detection and control of single molecules, such as glucose, and atmospheric contaminants.

A multidisciplinary group of research teams, working in the framework of FET OPEN Project SPRING (www.springfetopen.eu), report that certain stripes of graphene called graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) acquire the anomalous topological state of matter when narrowed down to just a few nanometers in width. The research has been recently published in Nature Communications. 

An international team, including the leader of the Nanooptics group at nanoGUNE, Rainer Hillenbrand, discusses in ‘Nature’  the state-of-the-art and opportunities for controlling the propagation of nanolight (in form of polaritons) in van der Waals materials with the help of classical refractive optics concepts, meta-optics and moire engineering.

Four international experts, including the leader of the Nanooptics group at nanoGUNE Rainer Hillenbrand, analyze in ‘Nature Photonics’ the terahertz scanning probe microscopy techniques that achieve spatial resolution on the scale of micrometres to ångströms, with particular emphasis on their overarching approaches and underlying probing mechanisms, and they forecast the next steps in the field.