New projects & Milestones

The work carried out by the Atomic Manipulation and Spectroscopy Group in 2020 was centred on the study of the (opto)electronic properties of carbon-based nanostructures and metalorganic topological insulators.

As an ongoing research of the on-surface synthesis of graphene nanostructures, we focused our efforts on exploring the flexibility of our method to produce atomically precise graphene nanoribbons (GNR) and nanoporous graphene (NPG) for varying pore geometry and shape, as well as chemical composition. We have been able to define precursors undergoing hierarchical synthetic paths that lead to NPGs with increased pore size with flexible connectors, or Nitrogen-doped pore edges, and GNRs with different edge functionalization. In parallel, we have continued exploring the application of the NPGs in different fields, from optoelectronics, to biosensing and nanosieving, by setting new in-house —NanoBiosensors and Bioanalytical Applications (NanoB2A) — and external (ICFO) collaborations. This research is carried out within the framework of FUNMOLDEV and PORMOLSYS, projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and the State Research Agency, as well as several institutional grants (BIST-IGNITE, ICN2-Severo Ochoa Seed Funding).

After our first publication on hybrid ferromagnetic/topological insulator heterostructures this year, we are extending these studies to the merging of the two functionalities in single-layer metal-organic topological insulators. We do that in a more general project which aims at the synthesis of conducting and magnetic 2D metal-organic frameworks, carried out within an in-house collaboration with the Nanostructured Functional Materials (Nanosfun) Group.

Within the framework of the TNSI project (Interreg POCTEFA) we have also dedicated efforts to the development of technologies related to instrumentation for nanoscience, as well as to the testing of related technologies commercialized by our industrial consortium partners on different scientific applications.