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.

An international team of researchers, including members of nanoGUNE's Nanooptics group, unveils in ‘Nature Communications’ fundamental aspects of nanolight refraction in highly anisotropic media. The researchers also report the design of a new planar nanolens 1000 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair, which enables control of nanolight propagation, laying the groundwork for the development of photonic nanotechnologies with exciting possibilities.

The National Research Council awards its "Severo Ochoa" and "Maria de Maeztu" hallmarks of excellence to a total of seven centers and six research units that stand out owing to the impact and international significance of their results. NanoGUNE has had its "Maria de Maeztu" distinction renewed and will receive funding to the tune of 500,000 euros per year over the coming four years.

Researchers from the Nanodevices Group at CIC nanoGUNE demonstrate that they can control the polarization direction of a spin current without having to apply a magnetic field, which could aid in implementing energy-efficient spintronics devices. The work has been published in Physical Review Letters.