Nanotechnology can offer disruptive ground-breaking solutions for the XXI century medicine, which is expected to become more precise, personalised, and predictive.

ICN2 aims to become a strategic driving force in the health ecosystem, building on its established research in health applications. Our strategic priorities include strengthening translational academic research, fostering closer collaboration with clinicians, and raising awareness and understanding of nanotechnologies among healthcare professionals and patients. These efforts will focus on developing innovative technologies for prevention, diagnosis and treatment, particularly in Oncology, Neurology and Infectious Diseases, while accelerating the transfer of knowledge and research results to clinical settings and health-related industries.

Nanotechnologies, nanostructured systems, and new materials are expected to play a key role in developing the next generation of technologies for communication and information processing with ultralow energy consumption.

Central to this third Severo Ochoa funding is tailoring artificial materials for specific applications by chemical and structural design, nano-assembling and carving, formation of hybrid covalent nanomaterials, and proximity effects in heterostructures. Topological materials and structures will be further explored for future communication technologies (beyond 5G) and for ancillary circuitry for emerging quantum technologies.

ICN2, which consistently leads international major research projects in areas such as quantum and topological matter, spintronics, photonics and phononics, will focus on developing novel Multivariable (e.g., spin, photon, phonon, magnon) Quantum & Neuromorphic technologies. Through the new AI platform at the institute (AI@ICN2), artificial intelligence will also be used to accelerate the design of nanoengineered materials for the best device performance.

Disruptive technologies are essential to meeting the urgent need to reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Nanotechnologies and advanced nanomaterials will play an increasingly important role in energy management. At ICN2, we will focus on developing efficient systems and advanced technologies for energy harvesting, conversion and storage, as well as thermal management. Our approach will combine the capabilities of the new AI@ICN2 platform with advanced infrastructure at ICN2 and the ALBA Synchrotron, giving access to previously unexplored spatial, temporal and energetic regimes and enabling the discovery of new practical energy materials. We will also consider the full lifecycle of these technologies to minimise their environmental footprint.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a powerful tool that can facilitate various steps in the research process. For example, AI can accelerate the exploration of the vast dimensional space of complex nanomaterials, establishing their structure and properties ahead of experimental research, and can enable automated complex data analysis to evaluate large data sets.

AI@ICN2 will provide internal operational guidance and tools, while pushing the development of machine learning (ML) methods in existing in-house molecular dynamics and quantum transport formalisms. Emerging activities will be strengthened by strategies for materials design and data analysis, enabling international collaborations with key academic and industrial partners. Our long-term vision is that AI@ICN2 will become a central and transformative driving force for sustainability and impact.

ICN2 holds great expertise in nanomaterials and nanofabrication and can count on state-of-the-art nanofabrication tools and cleanroom facilities. The Nanomaterials & Nanofabrication Research Area serves as a hub to the ICN2 Research Groups and Research Support Units for the synthesis of novel nanostructures and nanomaterials, using bottom-up or top-down approaches, according to the needs.

New procedure to accelerate industrial and clinical translation of nanotechnologies and nanomaterials will be developed and nanofabrication protocols and processes will be adapted to green chemistry principles, in order to achieve a more sustainable use of materials and reduce waste and toxic agents. In addition, the ICN2 will collaborate with other international institutes to carry out a Nanotoxicology Initiative, aimed at studying and assessing potential risks of nanomaterials for health and environments.

ICN2 can count on in-house advanced equipment and large-scale facilities for nanocharacterisation, as well as leading scientific expertise and technical competences in imaging, spectroscopy and manipulation at the nanoscale and in high temporal resolution spectroscopies.

Our Institute has attained a leading position in this area and recently secured substantial funding for advanced nanocharacterisation infrastructure. The In-CAEM project, supported with 15M€ from the EU Next Generation Programme, will provide access to a beyond-state-of-the-art nanocharacterisation platform for in-situ/in operando materials analysis, including top-end electron microscopy (EM), advanced scanning probe microscopies, adaptation of several synchrotron beam lines for correlative analyses and resources for data storage, data analysis and treatment.

ICN2 is an international reference in methodologies, computational tools and codes for modelling and simulation, which enable predictions of complex quantum phenomena in realistic models of materials, devices and processes (e.g., SIESTA and LSQUANT). These techniques are applied, in collaboration with the Research Groups, to the following topics, among others: neuromorphic computing, spintronics with van der Waals heterostructures, novel paradigms for quantum information transduction and processing in topological matter, electrochemical environments for energy storage/conversion and bioelectronic devices.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning methods will be also developed and harnessed in the context of local and international high-performance computing infrastructures and the forthcoming exascale era.