New national facility for materials research at the atomic scale
PHYSICS
Thanks to a €4.8 million grant from the Dutch Research Council, a consortium that includes four physicists from Leiden University will develop a national facility for atomic-scale research into novel materials. This initiative is expected to drive innovation for energy transition.
Producing materials at the atomic scale requires highly controlled conditions. To this end, a national consortium will establish new infrastructure dedicated to this process. In the future, the facility will also enable the scalable and industrial production of the most promising material designs.
Globally unique
Assistant Professor Semonti Bhattacharrya: ‘As far as we know, this facility is unique in the world. With this infrastructure, we can start producing large amounts of high-quality atomically thin materials, which can be the key to future low-power electronics, resulting in sustainable computation.’
‘As soon as the new facility is up and running, we can process them in a controlled atmosphere and interface them without introducing disorder,’ says Associate Professor Wolfgang Löffler. ‘Our team of Leiden physicists contributes towards process innovation, benchmarking devices, exploring new physical phenomena, and applications.’
Consortium National Scalable Atomic Processing Line (SAP-NL)
The project is a collaborative effort involving researchers from Delft University, Leiden University, University of Groningen, TU Eindhoven en de University of Twente. In total, the researchers have been awarded €4.8 million by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to start this Research Infrastructure programme.