Annual Report 2019 out now! Webbversion

NEWSLETTER FROM NANOSCIENCE AT LUND UNIVERSITY  |  MAY 2020

Our Annual Report is out! Having been a Strategic Research Area of Sweden for a full decade now, NanoLund can look back on yet another year of success. 286 scientific publications, directly related to nanoscience, sets a new record. Of the 148 PhD students actively engaged in Sweden’s largest research environment for interdisciplinary nanoscience and nanotechnology, 21 graduated during this year. NanoLund scientists presented our work in 19 different countries. Just to mention a few new grants, our members have attracted two new European Research Council grants, and were awarded three Swedish Research Council Research Environments, and three Wallenberg Scholar awards. There are now 15 active spin-off companies that have emerged from the NanoLund environment – one of them named Nordic Nanotech Company of the Year at the NanoForum 2019 conference. “I am very proud of the strong engagement of our members and staff that enables this breadth of high-level activity, and I am also most grateful to all our external partners in academia, industry, institutes, local and national administration”, says Heiner Linke, Director of NanoLund. More stats, figures and stories are to be found in the annual report, just arrived from the printworks, but also, of course, available as pdf. NanoLund Annual Report 2019 Please contact info@nano.lu.se for a paper copy. Important step towards new NanoLab at Science Village The location for NanoLab Science Village has been identified for a long time and the plan was approved by the City of Lund in 2018. The Board of the Faculty of Engineering, LTH, has now decided to move forward in the process of establishing a NanoLab at Brunnshög. As a natural next step, the Dean of LTH has assigned LU Byggnad to carry out a market survey followed by a procurement. The construction of NanoLab Science Village in Brunnshög is estimated to cost about SEK 300 million. The next step after the procurement will be a detailed negotiation of the building’s design in relation to the cost. Financing is not yet complete, and in the meantime, NanoLund’s and the University’s efforts continue to secure financing for both building, equipment and operations. – This is a strategic decision and in addition a first step to establish Lund University at Brunnshög. Someone needs to lead to get the process started, but we will need to work on many fronts to secure the financing, says Viktor Öwall. Read more on NanoLund's homepage NanoLund scientists mobilise against Covid-19 To detect a virus or other infectious agents, medical and clinical laboratories usually employ the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). It is a widely used method, in biomedical research, to make copies of DNA or RNA from a very small sample, amplifying it to a large enough amount to study in detail. The problem is: this technique takes time. NanoLund scientists within the research environment ”Genes&Wires” aim to detect DNA or RNA - such as virus RNA - without PCR. “The goal is to be able to read off the RNA directly, instead of having to wait for several hours which is the case when you involve the polymerase chain reaction”, says Heiner Linke, professor at Solid State Physics and director of NanoLund. This is just one of many research projects and activities relevant for Corona. Several research groups are working on proposals for funding, while the Department of Chemistry has set up a small chemical factory for producing alcohol-based solution for disinfection. And at Ergonomics and Aerosol Technology, Jakob Löndahl and his group are investigating how virus spreads through air, see article further down in this newsletter. Annual meeting 2020 Please save the date for the NanoLund Annual meeting 2020 on September 28, planned as a physical meeting at AF-borgen. More information and sign-up will come over the summer. Stay posted. GenerationNano GenerationNano is a Marie-Curie Cofund doctoral programme offering exciting research at the forefront of nanoscience, full-time employment for four years, an international network of cooperation partners and a comprehensive course program. One important component of the program is that secondment (internship) is an integral part of the training. The program will co-fund in total 14 doctoral students, who we will recruit in two calls during 2020. In the first call, we had 490 applicants for 11 positions. GenerationNano PhD position descriptions. New look on nano.lu.se In early February we launched our website on a new platform - Have you seen it yet? Check it out to find news, people, descriptions of research and facilities, and information about interaction possibilities. www.nano.lu.se Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn Twitter: @NanoLund LinkedIn: We have a company page. Why not update your personal profile by adding your present NanoLund-affiliation under profile section “Work experience”? News on NanoLund People ERC Advanced Grant awarded to Anne L’Huillier Anne L’Huillier has been awarded the prestigious European Research Council’s (ERC) Advanced Grant of approximately SEK 25 million for the project Quantum Physics with Attosecond Pulses. With the grant from ERC, Anne and colleagues plan to use laser technology to create ultra-short light pulses to study the motion of electrons within atoms and molecules. Their work will provide a new basic understanding of the dynamics inside atoms. More information on Anne L'Huillier's project. ERC Consolidator Grant to Åsa Haglund Åsa Haglund (at Chalmers University, NanoLund Affiliated Faculty Member) has won an ERC consolidator grant with the title: “UV-LASE: Out of the blue: membrane-based microcavity lasers from the blue to the ultraviolet wavelength regime”, including support on approximately 2 MEuro. The goal is to demonstrate an electrically driven ultraviolet-emitting vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser. Read more about Åsa Haglunds ERC project on Chalmers homepage. Maria Messing wins Future Research Leaders grant  Maria Messing receives a Future Research Leaders grant from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research. Nano Design meets Organic Chemistry for Greener Catalysts is the name of the research program. The purpose is to combine nanoscale processing and organic chemistry to develop new types of rationally designed catalysis, that can lead to more sustainable production. Read more about Maria Messings project on NanoLunds homepage Thomas Laurell wins Distinguished Professor grant Thomas Laurell won a Distinguished Professor grant from the Swedish Research Council with the title “Ultrasonic standing wave fields and extracellular vesicles enable novel routes in medical diagnostics and biopharmaceutical production”, including support of 48 MSEK for ten years. More links to reading about the Distinguished Professor grant Research environment grants hosted by NanoLund Our strategic emphasis on precision medicine – using nanotechnology tools for medical diagnostics – has received substantial new funding in the form of Research Environment Grants from the Swedish Research Council: “Multiscale biomechanics from molecules to cells in cancer” led by Jonas Tegenfeldt and with Chris Madsen, Pontus Nordenfelt and Vinay S. Swaminathan as co-applicants; “Single molecule bioanalytical sensing for precision cancer diagnostics” with Heiner Linke as PI and with Fredrik Höök, Christelle Prinz and Thoas Fioretis as co-applicants. Furthermore, Sara Linse is a co-applicant for a third new Research Environment Grant, namely ”CASCADE: Cause or Consequence in Alzheimer Disease?” led by Emma Sparr. Camilla Modéer named Honorary Doctor Camilla Modéer, chair of NanoLund's External Advisory Council and member of the NanoLund Board has been named honorary doctor by The Faculty of Engineering at Lund University. Camilla has supported NanoLund for many years, not the least by providing invaluable feedback on NanoLund engagement activities. Camilla is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, and one of the founders of VA (Public&Science) , an independent Swedish non-profit membership organisation that works to promote dialogue and openness between researchers and the public. She has also been on the board of The Faculty of Engineering at Lund University and she has been a member of the steering group of Sveriges industriförbund (later the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise; Svenskt näringsliv). NanoLund in Media Air samples from coronavirus patient rooms being analysed There are many questions concerning the coronavirus and infection prevention that need to be answered as soon as possible. Jakob Löndahl, associate professor in aerosol technology at Lund University and faculty member of NanoLund is currently working to analyse air samples from patient rooms at Lund University hospital trying to detect the virus. Read more about Jakob's research on Lund University's home page. Protecting nano-thin oxide layer studied with Alfa Laval Together with Alfa Laval and MAX IV, NanoLund researchers have studied and imaged stainless steel in an extreme atomic scale. The purpose: to use the valuable insights from the experiment in Alfa Laval’s future product development. For the first time ever, the thin layer of oxide could be imaged during high temperatures, due to the extreme atomic scale surface resolution of the microscope. Read more about the collaboration and outcome. Research Highlights New imaging method sheds light on Alzheimer’s disease Oxana Klementieva and her colleagues in Lund and at Synchrotron SOLEIL in France have used a new method, optical photothermal spectroscopy (O-PTIR) to study protein structures in neurons from mice affected by early stage Alzheimer’s disease. “We saw that the structure of the protein changes in different ways depending on where in the nerve cell it is. So far, there have been no methods that can produce these types of images, giving us insight into what the first molecular changes in neurons actually look like in Alzheimer's disease”, says Oxana Klementieva. Their work has been published in the journal Advanced Science, and featured on the cover page. Read more on the NanoLund homepage including links to the scientific article in Advanced Science. No quantum effect in photosynthetic light harvesting In a recent review article Donatas Zigmantas and colleagues from 16 universities and institutes in Europe, Canada, the US and Singapore critically assess previously proposed persistence and role of quantum coherence in photosynthetic light harvesting. In the article they analyse the recent work on coherence in photosynthetic complexes, in particular, the results from femtosecond multidimensional spectroscopy studies on the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) protein, a light-harvesting complex from green sulfur bacteria, which has taken on an exemplary role in quantum biology. Their results unambiguously show the absence of long-lived interexciton coherence on the time scales relevant for the energy transfer in this system, both at cryogenic and physiological temperatures. Thus it is recovered that nature instead of preserving coherence and avoiding dissipation, embraces the latter to facilitate the efficient and robust energy collection. More links on the quantum effect research.  Porous gold nanosponges can be useful in future computers In a paper, recently published in Nature Communications with researchers from NanoLund and Lund Laser Centre, the ultrafast optical dynamics of porous gold nanosponges filled with zinkoxide was studied. This type of hybrid plasmon-emitter system could be useful for future optical computers as they are able to strongly amplify laser light. The study provides fundamental new insights into how hybrid metal-semiconductor nanostructures amplify light and will help develop materials with even better optical properties. Few-femtosecond time-resolved photoelectron emission microscopy revealed multiple long-lived localized plasmonic hot spot modes in the pores of the nanosponges, that were resonant in a broad spectral range. The strong, local plasmonic near-field couples to the ZnO excitons, enhancing sum-frequency generation from individual hot spots and boosting resonant excitonic emission. The research was done in collaboration with two German universities: Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg och Teknische Universität Ilmenau. More reading about the porous gold nanosponges. Coming up Introduction to NanoLund. Are you a new NanoLund employee? Welcome to our Introduction to NanoLund event on Monday September 14, 2020 from 14:00 to 16:30. The event is open to everyone who has joined NanoLund relatively recently: PhD students, postdocs, administrative and technical staff - and all who always wanted to know more. Stay tuned! INASCON 2020 August 11-13 2020 INASCON (International Nanoscience Student Conference) is an annual international academic conference about nanoscience. It is organized by students for students, academics, businesses, or anyone interested in nanoscience. This year it is arranged by NanoLund students. More information and registration at the INASCON homepage. Nanoscience Colloquia coming up We are working on designing an exciting program for the fall and you can look forward to some great talks. Due to the travel restrictions some talks may be online. Stay tuned and see the program on the NanoLund homepage as it develops. Articles from NanoLund Researchers Recent scientific articles from NanoLund researchers (the link redirects to Lund University's Research Portal - most recent articles on top).

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