Friday, 22 July, 2022
From a logic gate for ultrafast electronics to miniaturized optical data links - Nano Innovation Award 2022
LMU Center for NanoScience and four spin-off companies jointly honor innovative PhD students
From left to right: jury member Michael George (Nanion), Maximilian Ochs, Tim Schröder, jury member Prof. Klaus Sailer (Hochschule München), Tobias Boolakee, and Dr. Philipp Baaske (NanoTemper)
Three PhD students from Erlangen, Würzburg and Munich were honored this year with the Nano Innovation Award. The prize for innovative research in the application-oriented nanosciences, which is endowed with a total of 9,000 euros, was announced throughout Bavaria and awarded by a jury of experts from industry and science.
In contrast to most science prizes, which honor excellent results in basic research, the Nano Innovation Award focuses on innovation and application potential. Since 2015, the prize money has been donated by four successful spin-offs of the Center for NanoScience (CeNS), which are directly linked to the idea of the nano Inovation Award through their own company history: The companies attocube systems AG, ibidi GmbH, Nanion Technologies GmbH and NanoTemper Technologies GmbH together with CeNS award talented and imaginative young scientists whose results are not only of interest for basic research but at the same time promise novel technological applications.
The first prize went to Tobias Boolakee from Friedrich Alexander University in Erlangen. A fundamental component of any computer architecture are logic gates that switch binary signals 0 or 1 using Boolean functions. Today's electronic devices are limited in their clock speed primarily by the speed of capacitive signal propagation and achieve clock rates of 1-10 GHz. In the group of Professor Peter Hommelhoff, Tobias Boolakee has now demonstrated for the first time a gate for extremely fast electronics based on a deep understanding of the physics in graphene and in graphene-gold interfaces when driven by ultrashort laser pulses. Controlling electrical signals with light could make computational operations of future computers at least ten thousand times faster than they are now - that's the goal of petahertz or lightwave electronics. With the work of Tobias Boolakee and his collaborative partners at the University of Rochester, the vision of ultrafast computers has moved a little closer.
The jury awarded second prize to Maximilian Ochs from the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg. Information processing in computers is carried out by electronic circuits that can be miniaturized down to the nanometer range. In contrast, information is transmitted over longer distances via photons in optical fibers, where the wavelength of the light hinders miniaturization. Miniaturized optical data links would be a great help in overcoming the bandwidth bottleneck that occurs in modern computer chips. In his work, Maximilian Ochs developed an electrically driven plasmonic Yagi-Uda nanoantenna that can be used as a miniaturized electron-photon transducer, emitting photons in a well-defined, directional beam once excited by a tunneling electron. He was thus able to show that it is possible to build extremely small electrically driven photon sources and simple photon processing circuits that are directly connected to a nanoelectronic system while maintaining the same level of miniaturization.
Third place went to Tim Schröder of LMU Munich. With his work in Philip Tinnefeld's group, he succeeded in overcoming previous limitations of fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS). To do so, he elegantly combined fluorescence lifetime information with intensity correlations. His ideas can be easily implemented in laboratories that use FCS in combination with time correlated single photon counting. In another project in a collaboration with GATTAquant GmbH, Tim Schröder developed nanobeads with highest brightness and maximum signal homogeneity (which were then named GATTA beads). This work will be of practical use to a broad scientific community as well as to the drug discovery community, which uses FCS to find binding partners.
"The formation of Nanion Technologies 20 years ago has been strongly supported by the entrepreneurial spirit of CeNS. We feel that CeNS with its interdisciplinary communicative culture is a very important community that helps to transfer excellent scientific research into successful business stories. The Nano Innovation Award is honoring the same thing: The transformation of scientific findings into real world applications. We were once again impressed by the variety of this years applications - and congratulate all winners and participants", says Michael George, CTO Nanion Technologies and 2022 jury member.