Universidad of Zaragoza (Spain)

The Universidad of Zaragoza (UNIZAR) is one of the oldest (500 years) and most prestigious Spanish universities. The UNIZAR coordinates the Excellence Campus Iberus, considered as one of the leading research and education areas in Spain. Different rankings place UNIZAR within the best 500 universities in the world. In particular, the activities in Materials Science, Nanoscience, and Condensed Matter Physics are prestigious at the international level, with two excellent research centers on these topics: the Institute of Materials Science of Aragon and the Institute of Nanoscience of Aragon. The Advanced Microscopy Laboratory (LMA) located at the Institute of Nanoscience of Aragon in UNIZAR represents a unique initiative nationally and internationally. Its aim is to provide the scientific community with the most advanced existing equipment and infrastructures in local probe and electron microscopy for the observation, characterization, nanopatterning and handling of materials at atomic level, as well as a wide range of scientific tools devoted to characterization, processing and handling procedures at the nanometric scale. The LMA hosts three microscopy areas: those of Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), Dual Beam (DB) and Scanning Probe Microscopy (SPM).

The scientists of the LMA develop several research lines relevant to the proposal:

• Study of nanosystems for biological or physical applications. The aim of the studies of these systems is to establish correlations between the structures at the nanometer scale of these nano-objects with their functional properties.
• Energy Electron Loss Spectroscopy (EELS) performed at the high spatial and energy resolution, Quantitative High Resolution TEM, and Tomography.
• Study of interfaces in heterostructures. The studies concern the study of structural properties (defects, epitaxy, strain) studied by Quantitative HRTEM and the chemistry and electronic structure of the interfaces investigated by the analysis of the EELS core loss fine structure of interfaces in thin films or multilayers either of 3d metals or in oxide (perovskite or spinel type).

List of recent publications related to the project:

• Llordes, A ; et al. Nature Materials Nanoscale strain-induced pair suppression as a vortex-pinning mechanism in high-temperature superconductors, 11 (2012) 329-336
• Schuster, F ; et al. Nano Letters Self-Assembled GaN Nanowires on Diamond, 12 (2012) 2199-2204
• Mayoral, A ; Magen, C ; Jose-Yacaman, M Chem. Comm. Nanoscale mapping of plasmon resonances of functional multibranched gold nanoparticles 48 (2012) 8667-8669
• Serrate, D ; et al., Biosensors & Bioelectronics, Quantitative biomolecular sensing station based on magnetoresistive patterned arrays 35 (2012) 206-212
• Fernandez-Pacheco, A ; et al. Nanotechnology Correlation between the magnetic imaging of cobalt nanoconstrictions and their magnetoresistance response 23 (2012) 105703
• Carretero-Genevrier, A ; et al. Chem. Comm., Chemical synthesis of oriented ferromagnetic LaSr-2 x 4 manganese oxide molecular sieve nanowires 48 (2012) 6223-6225

Web page: http://ina.unizar.es/