Author: Andrew See

National Research Infrastructure Capability Issues Paper Released

The National Research Infrastructure Capability Issues Paper has been released. The paper presents a range of issues relating to national research infrastructure capability areas and is the first step in working towards a shared view of the capabilities that require national research infrastructure to support current, new and emerging areas of research and innovation. It sets out the proposed capability requirements that will inform the development of the 2016 Roadmap.

In conjunction with the release of the Issues Paper, a range of consultations will occur around Australia from July. Dates and the registration form are available from the following link:

https://education.gov.au/news/consultations-commence-national-research-infrastructure-capability-issues-paper

Enabling Technologies Workshop

To build on the strong history of science and technology collaboration between the United States and Australia, the 2016 Enabling Technologies Technical Exchange Meeting will be held at the University of New South Wales from 23rd – 25th May 2016.

The purpose of the technical exchange is to explore and potentially develop new areas of basic research collaboration between Australian and US participants. This meeting is being held under the auspices of the 2015 United States-Australia Joint Commission Meeting (JCM) on Science and Technology.

The three overarching technical thrusts are:

  • Materials Science
  • Physics
  • Biomedical Sciences

US participation will include the Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation as well as academic researchers.

Australian researchers are now invited to submit abstracts for inclusion 
in the program.

For more information please see the national website.

Diagnostic technique for Cancer dialysis

ANFF-NSW user Dr Majid Warkiani has recently made some press about his research on a cancer diagnostic technique, which is now being repurposed to filter cancer cells out of a patient’s body.

The cancer diagnosis technique, developed by Majid, from UNSW’s School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, is capable of detecting and removing a tiny handful of cancer-spreading cells from among the billions of healthy cells in a small blood sample.

The revolutionary system, which has been described as “dialysis for cancer”, is now in clinical trials in the US, UK and Australia, and is in the process of being commercialised by Clearbridge BioMedics. For further details on this story please visit the UNSW Newsroom.

Earlier this year Majid was also named one of top ten innovators aged under 35 in the Asia-Pacific by the prestigious MIT Technology Review.

The ANFF-NSW team is delighted to be associated with Majid and we anticipate we will see more exciting research coming from him in the near future.

ANFF-NSW Publication Award

Ferroelectric superlattices exhibit a built-in electric field which have a number of potential applications including actuation, energy storage and random access memories. In a recent paper published in the journal Applied Materials & Interfaces, ANFF-NSW user Qianru Lin investigated the Periodicity Dependence of these built-in electric fields in (Ba0.7Ca0.3)TiO3/Ba(Zr0.2Ti0.8)O3 ferroelectric superlattices.

Qianru made use of the laser MBE system in the ANFF-NSW laboratories to grow the superlattices used in the study. As Qianru included an acknowledgement to ANFF-NSW in her paper she has received an ANFF-NSW Publication Award.

All reports of research which have been enabled by ANFF-NSW should contain the following acknowledgement: ‘This work was performed in part at the NSW Node of the Australian National Fabrication Facility’. Each refereed journal publication containing an appropriate acknowledgement of ANFF-NSW is eligible for an ANFF-NSW Publication Award which comprises $500 worth of ANFF-NSW access. Please contact Dr Linda Macks for further details.

Top ten physics breakthrough of 2015

The world-first quantum logic gate in silicon constructed by a team led by ANFF-NSW Director Prof Andrew Dzurak and lead author Dr Menno Veldhorst appeared in Nature earlier this year. On December 11, Physics World, the member magazine of the Institute of Physics recognised the work as one of the most significant breakthroughs in physics of 2015. To meet the criteria for the Breakthrough of the Year Awards the research must be considered as being fundamentally important, a significant advance in knowledge, having a strong connection between theory and experiment and being of general interest to all physicists

You can see an interview with Prof Dzurak on ABC News24 Breakfast about the breakthrough here.

Much of the device fabrication and process development work behind this breakthrough was conducted in the ANFF-NSW laboratories. For more details on this story, please visit: http://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/unsw-quantum-research-global-‘top-10-breakthroughs-2015’-0