New projects & Milestones
In order to face the lack of advanced infrastructure for electron microscopy in Catalonia, our group established strong international collaborations with prestigious microscopy research centres and facilities worldwide. In parallel, in the last 5 years, we have been working at all levels to secure the funding that will allow purchasing modern electron microscopes in the Barcelona area. To this purpose, we are leading the scientific part of the METCAM-FIB project (~4 M€), which will allow the acquisition of an advanced electron microscope for materials science and a Focus Ion Beam (FIB). This advanced (S)TEM will be placed at the ALBA Synchrotron by the end of 2021. The analytic possibilities that the new infrastructure will provide as well as the synergies within the BIST and CSIC institutes, the UAB and the ALBA Synchrotron will be at the core of our future plans for the next 5 years.
The new microscopes will allow expanding the group capabilities on the in-situ correlative electron/synchrotron microscopy on energy nanomaterials and will enable us to perform a more accurate study on the direct correlation and atomic detection research lines.
The next steps moving forward in the energy nanomaterials research line will be related to the development of in-situ / in-operando experiments in the electron microscope to understand the physical and chemical phenomena promoting the different energy mechanisms (e.g., photoelectrochemical) with unprecedented resolution. Taking advantage of the synergy with the ALBA Synchrotron we will work on developing correlative in-situ electron microscopy and synchrotron experiments (unprecedented in EU), in correlation with the developed theoretical models.
On the other hand, our research line devoted to the direct correlation between atomic scale structure/composition and sub-nanometre scale physical properties will benefit from the secured funds of the collaborative project with Microsoft for the next years. The greater analysis capabilities offered by the new infrastructure will allow studying novel hybrid semiconductor/ superconductor Majorana nanowires for their application in quantum computing and better understanding the complex physical phenomena involved in the related devices.