Press Release
During the last two decades, a revolutionary
scientific new age, based on the capacity to observe, characterize,
manipulate and organize matter in the nanometric scale,
is appearing. In this scale, physics, chemistry, materials
science, computational theory, and engineering converge
towards the same theoretical principles and experimental
findings that are basically governed by the laws of the
Quantum Mechanics. Nanotechnology involves these interdisciplinary
knowledge areas and methodologies in order to study, manufacture
and characterize functional structures with dimensions
of tens of nanometers.
The five year-old NanoSpain network aims to agglutinate and coordinate
the efforts made in the field of the Nanotechnology by Spanish groups
from universities, research institutes and companies. Moreover, this
network has tried to help the government institutions in defining potential
actions and plans referring to this area. Currently the NanoSpain network,
comprising 151 Spanish groups with near 1000 researchers in total, is
one of the widest Spanish scientific networks.
As a direct and most effective way to enhance the interaction between
our network members, a first network meeting was organised in San Sebastian
(2004) with around 210 participants registered. Due to this success,
the network decided organising its second meeting in Barcelona (March
14-17, 2005) with a similar format.
Its objective was also to facilitate the dissemination of knowledge and
promote interdisciplinary discussions among the different NanoSpain groups.
In order to organise the various sessions and to select contributions, the meeting was structured in the following thematic lines, but
interactions among them were promoted:
1. Advanced Nanofabrication Methods
2. NanoBiotechnology
3. NanoMaterials
4. NanoChemistry
5. NanoElectronics / Molecular Electronics
6. Scanning Probe Microscopies (SPM)
7. Scientific infrastructures and Scientific Parks
8. Simulation at the nanoscale
Invited Speakers:
-Markus Antonietti (Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Germany)
-Martin Bennink (MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology, Netherlands)
-Heinrich Hofmann (EPFL, Switzerland)
-Lars Montelius (University of Lund - Nanometer Consortium, Sweden)
-Miquel Salmeron (Lawrence Berkeley University, USA)
-Frank Scheffold (University of Fribourg,
Switzerland)
-Jose-Luis Viviente (European Commission - NMP, Belgium)
Working Groups (WG) were also organised to enhance information flow
between network partners and in particular:
-Exchange information of current work in specific research areas
-Solve particular technological problems
-Look for areas of common ground between different technologies
-Provide contributions to specific reports
The following WG were organised:
1. Molecular Electronics (Coordinators: Julio Gomez & Pablo Ordejon)
2. NanoBiotechnology (Coordinator: Josep Samitier)
3. NanoFabrication (Coordinators: Francesc Perez-Murano & Fernando Briones)
Another objective of this meeting was to permit considering the
situation of Nanotechnology in our country, as well as in reaching
conclusions concerning the future of the NanoSpain network, in order
to guarantee its continuity by means of concrete proposals and a renovation
of its structures.
The organisation would like to acknowledge all the participants and contributors.