Superconducting graphene

Graphene’s business card is running out of space. We’ve already seen it doing nearly every possible thing in condensed matter physics. And superconductivity was to be there. It was a matter of time.

Magnetism and superconductivity don’t get along… to put it politely. So when you add magnetic atoms into a superconductor, the superconducting order is locally broken and spectral features (called Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states) appear inside the superconducting gap. And this features are important because they might be useful for quantum computing. 

Ivan Bruhuega, has lead an important research collaboration involving several countries (Finland, France, Portugal and Spain), that has for the first time observed these Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states in graphene. The complexity of this experiment is hard to grasp. To begin with, you have to induce superconductivity in graphene. They’ve done this by growing nanometer scale superconducting Pb islands over it. And then, using scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy they’ve visualized Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states in the graphene grain boundaries. Quite a challenge.

We made this picture to illustrate the experience and it’s been featured in the cover of Advanced Materials.

Atomic dialogues

Here I bring you another scientific milestone performed in TUDelft and published in Science. This time is about single atoms exchanging quantum information and in the way, unveiling quantum mechanics at a fundamental level. Veldman et al. have been spying single magnetic atoms and they’ve observed their reaction when one of their neighbours received an electric pulse. And this is not an easy task.

First, Sander Otte’s team has to built this “neighbourhood” of atoms by placing them close to each other at a distance at which they’re able to “feel” each other’s magnetic moments. And then the fun part starts: they send a pulse at one of the atoms and observe its neighbour’s reaction. This starts a sort of a conversation between the two atoms, an interchange of quantum information. A kind of a dance in which the two atoms swap their magnetic moment back and forth.

This observation has some interesting implications: first, it means another step in the understanding of qbits. But the inherent violence of the process (this aggressive non-coherent electric pulse) could mean that we might not need to be so careful at initializing quantum states.

To illustrate this conversation we made this picture under the close supervision of Prof. Sander Otte.

Anti-metastatic treatment for breast cancer

Nanosized drug delivery systems based strategies are slowly changing our view of medical treatment. They can be applied to a wide variety of diseases and Dr. María J. Vicent (Polymer Therapeutics Lab) and Dr. Marcelo Calderón (POLYMAT) are designing new approaches expand their usage and improve their efficiency.

 

In their last work, they deal with triple negative breast cancer and its associated metastasis, for which we lack effective treatments. In their recent paper in Journal of Controlled Release, they propose “injectable poly-amino acid-based nanogels as a versatile hydrophilic drug delivery platform for the treatment of triple negative breast cancer lung metastasis”. These nanogels deliver the chemotherapeutic agents in more restricted, specific areas increasing their efficiency thus reducing their aggressiveness.

We designed this representation of the drug delivery process under the supervision of  María J. Vicent and Marcelo Calderón. Their work has been featured at the cover of JCR.

On pandemics, flexible spikes and mechanical stability

The SARS-CoV-2 is covered by a layer of “spikes” whose mobility (yet to be determined) has been proposed to be related to the infection process. Miklós S. Z. Kellermayer et al. (Semmelweis University, Budapest) “by imaging and mechanically manipulating individual, native SARS-CoV-2 virions with AFM” have proved that this layer is in fact dynamic. The virions show also a remarkable resistance to deformation and they’re able to recover from extreme mechanical deformations. You can read the details in their paper published in Nanoletters.

As a side note, the AFM experimental images they’ve published are just beautiful.

To illustrate the experiments we made this picture, under the close supervision of first author, Bálint Kiss, which has been featured in the cover of Nanoletters.

 

The Saga goes on!

The Saga of the Third Daughter has reached its fourth chapter: The Battle of the Giants in which the origin of the oceans is told. In the following months, life will appear and it will establish the principles of a huge disaster. But that is yet to come.


Good Vibrations

Today we want to talk about light and molecular vibrations coupling. It is known that infrared light can interact with matter through the molecules natural vibrations. What it was not so well known is that this coupling between light and matter can be so strong that it can change the material properties. But this strong-coupling-landscape has yet to be explored.

Researchers from CIC nanoGUNE BRTA (San Sebastian, Spain), the Donostia International Physics Center (San Sebastián, Spain) and the University of Oviedo (Spain) have employed a spectroscopic nanoimaging technique to achieve this strong coupling. By using “a particularly strong compression of infrared light” and a “thin layer of hexagonal boron nitride” they’ve explored in real space “how the phonon polaritons couple with the molecular vibrations” of organic molecules.

Their findings, published in Nature Photonics could have an impact in molecules detection technologies but more importantly, it opens a door to the study of quantum aspects of strong vibrational coupling.

This picture we did under the supervision of Andrei Bylinkin (first author) has been featured in the cover of Nature Photonics.

Boosting our batteries

Up to this point we’ve all recognized graphene’s omnipotence. This time we bring it to the website in its role of “energy storage enhancer”. At CIC energiGUNE, Daniel Carriazo et al., have just shown how functionalizing  graphene with phosphate groups in lithium-ion capacitors, highly improves both their power but more interestingly, they cyclability.

This picture, made under the supervision of Daniel Carriazo, has appeared as the cover feature at Batteries and Supercaps.

A sustainable Internet of Things ecosystem

A future of wireless self‐powered devices is upon us. The number of sensors and devices in our close environment is growing fast. And so does its energy demand.

 

In his last paper, Vincenzo Pecunia proposes the use of indoor photovoltaics: a clean sustainable way to fulfill this demand with lead‐free (and thus, non toxic) perovskite‐inspired materials. In particular Pecunia and co-workers, have studied two materials, BiOI and Cs3Sb2ClxI9‐x which happen to be really bad at harvesting sun light but present high efficiencies under indoor light conditions.

This research opens a door to the study of more efficient, non-toxic perovskite‐inspired materials and a sustainable future.

Under close supervision of Dr. Pecunia we made this picture that has been featured as the cover of Advanced Energy Materials.

 

Single-molecule junctions and atomic contacts

Dr. Laura Rincón made her thesis defense in August 2009. The manuscript, titled Conductance, thermopower and thermal conductance measurements in single-molecule junctions and atomic contacts, is a study on the properties of these contacts in the context of molecular electronics and thermoelectricity. The defense was recently awarded with the Best Experimental Thesis GEFES award.

Dr. Rincón used this picture we made years ago on request of her PhD advisor Prof. Nicolás Agrait.

Invoking Spin Waves into the real world

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has long been used as a non invasive detection technique in scientific research, industry and medicine. However, its low resolution (in the order of millimeters) makes it useless for nanotechnology applications despite its huge potential.

And this is were researchers from TU Delft, Leiden University, Tohoku University and the Max Planck Institute come into play. They’ve recently developed an MRI-like technique able to imaging magnetic waves with sub-micron resolution. Among its capacities, it is able to imaging spin waves through opaque materials such as the metal wiring on a chip. And also, it has the sensitivity to detect spin waves in magnets that are only a single atom thick. This work has been published in Science Advances.

If you’ve read my posts, you’ll know I don’t usually value my own images. But in this occasion I have to. This might be the most elegant picture I’ve made up to date. And for that, I have to thank the direction of Iacopo Bertelli and Toeno Van der Sar.