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- Project to develop magnetic iron oxide particles with improved efficiency - Agreement on funding by German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology from the German Mittelstand innovation...

At SPIE Photonics West 2013, imec presents a prototype hyperspectral imager for snapshot and video acquisition. Being fast, compact and cost-efficient, imec's CMOS-based imaging systems with integrate...

Organizing the Nano World Cancer Day: A European multi-sites event in Paris, Braga and Berlin In the framework of the World Cancer Day, the European Technology Platform of Nanomedicine (ETPN) and i...

Coupling the wonder material to a photonic crystal nanocavity helps it absorb more light.

Graphene has been the subject of an explosion of technical research in recent years as a result of its unique combination of superior properties. It has become the starting point for disruptive technologies in a wide range of fields including high performance computing, transparent conductors, printed electronics, displays, solar photovoltaics, and sensors. Pathways to large area, high throughput production of graphene materials have been established, and key cases emerging from research labs around the globe have demonstrated the advantages of graphene for the applications noted above. The European Commission recently announced graphene as one of the EU’s first 10-year, 1 Billion euro Future Emerging Technology (FET) flagships. The goal of the Graphene Flagship is to accelerate the path of graphene and related layered materials from academic laboratory research to scaled commercialization. The resulting societal benefit and subsequent revolutionizing of multiple industry sectors should create substantial economic growth and new jobs in the EU. The recent announcement is noteworthy as it is launching a coordinated public-private partnership research initiative of unprecedented scale. The Graphene Flagship assembles an academic-industrial consortium which aims to create an innovation pipeline extending across the value chain, targeting specific technological breakthroughs in order to fuel the innovation cycle. The research effort will cover the entire value chain from materials production to components and system integration, and it targets a number of specific goals that exploit the unique properties of graphene. The NNN applauds this announcement as a timely example of the potential impact of public-private partnerships related to critical, game changing technology developments in with specific relevance to nanomaterials and nanomanufacturing. The recent announcement is included below:

Many researchers are investigating the development of flexible solar cells in hopes of improving efficiency and lowering manufacturing costs. As an important member of the organic photovoltaics (OPV) family, polymer solar cells draw the most research interest, due to the relatively high power conversion efficiency achieved. However, compared to the high efficiencies (>10%) of inorganic solar cells, the best polymer solar cells (6-7%) still show a lower efficiency.

A team of researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has shown that by bringing gold nanoparticles close to the dots and using a DNA template to control the distances, the intensity of a quantum dot's fluorescence can be predictably increased or decreased.* This breakthrough opens a potential path to using quantum dots as a component in better photodetectors, chemical sensors and nanoscale lasers.