Author: sander

Interconnecting different quantum systems is important for future quantum computing architectures, but has proven difficult to achieve. Researchers from the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), FOM and the University of Vienna have now realized a first step towards a universal quantum link based on quantum-mechanical vibrations of a nanomechanical device. The researchers’ findings were…

The Kondo effect – an intricate quantum phenomenon involving the spins of many electrons surrounding a magnetic atom – is already quite intriguing by itself. But an even higher level of complexity is reached when two coupled atoms are together Kondo-screened. Depending on the competition between the exchange interaction and the screening strength, combined with…

When electrons tunnel through an atom, they may lose energy in the process. Such inelastic cotunneling events render the atom in an excited state, either with a flipped spin or with an entirely different orbital filling. In a recent paper in Nano Letters of the Otte Lab, we report the observation of both types of cotunneling…

Simon Gröblacher co-authors a Hanbury Brown and Twiss type experiment with phonons performed at Caltech, which was recently published in the renowned journal Nature. Pioneering photon counting experiments, such as the intensity interferometry performed by Hanbury Brown and Twiss to measure the angular width of visible stars, have played a critical role in our understanding…

Spin waves are the elementary excitations of any magnetic material and play an essential role in all magnetic dynamics, for example in the flipping of a bit on a hard disk. In Nature Materials, Spinelli et al. of the Otte Lab report the observation of individual spin waves in a self-built magnetic bit of only 6…

The cantilever is a prototype of a highly compliant mechanical system and has an instrumental role in nanotechnology, enabling surface microscopy, and ultrasensitive force and mass measurements. Here we report fluctuation-induced transitions between two stable states of a strongly driven microcantilever. Geometric nonlinearity gives rise to an amplitude-dependent resonance frequency and bifurcation occurs beyond a…

The first paper of the Otte Lab has appeared in Physical Review Letters: Local Control of Single Atom Magnetocrystalline Anisotropy When a magnetic atom is embedded in a material, magnetocrystalline anisotropy causes its magnetic moment to favor certain axes over others to orient itself along. It is this property that ultimately makes a material magnetically…

MED Postdoc Enrique Burzuri managed to acquire two prestigious grants: a VENI from NWO and an FET Young Explorers grant from the EU. Enrique will use the funding to investigate applications of magnetic molecules and graphene in electronic circuits.

In the recent internal NanoFront PhD funding round, MED scientists succeeded in acquiring 4 positions. The winning projects are: Bionanoelectronics: unlocking the secrets of bacterial nanowires by Herre van der Zant in collaboration with Bertus Beaumont (BN) Quantum matter nanodevices by Andrea Caviglia in collaboration with Lieven Vandersypen (QT) The molecular-size spectrometer by Gary Steele…

Check out this paper by Michael Perrin and coworkers published in Nature Nanotechnology, titled Large tunable image-charge effects in single-molecule junctions! Effect of image-charges on electron transport better understood Molecules are very small and typically just several nanometres in size. A single molecule between two electrodes could be used as an electronic device, such as…