Author: Andrew See

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

2015 NMI Prize winner

Congratulations to Dr Alessandro Rossi from the University of New South Wales who has been awarded the 2015 NMI prize for excellence in measurement research. Dr Rossi has been developing quantum dot-based single electron pump devices (fully fabricated within the ANFF-NSW laboratories) to serve as a metrological standard for electric current. Most recent results have achieved a current greater than 80 pA with an uncertainty of less than 30 parts per million – almost two orders of magnitude better performance than in any other silicon-based implementation.

Epitaxial Growth Laboratory

With a total capital value of $3.28M, the new Epitaxial Growth Laboratory houses three state-of-the-art molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) systems allowing the growth of custom-designed materials – that is, crystal structures are grown one layer of atoms at a time with precise control of atomic concentrations according to a researcher’s design. MBE techniques enable novel technologies by allowing researchers to enhance performance levels of existing materials and create new materials not possible by any other methods.

One of the MBE systems in the new laboratory is dedicated to compound semiconductors, whilst the other two systems are capable of producing a wide range of oxides, nitrides and other complex materials. This capability will facilitate innovation in a range of high-impact and emerging research areas, including: quantum sciences and engineering; clean energy conversion technologies, such as solar cells, thermoelectrics and fuel cell technologies; advanced electronics and optoelectronics, such as Terahertz emitters and detectors; and new materials for spintronic devices, sensing and memory technologies.

The flagship tools in the laboratory were funded under the Australian Research Council’s (ARC) Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) program, and the laboratory is operated via support from NCRIS. This support includes provision of highly skilled technical personnel to operate the complex machinery and provide expertise in material development to researchers.