Nanomicrowave

The major objective of the NANOMICROWAVE Network is to train a new generation of multidisciplinary researchers in the field of nanoscale microwave technologies and related emerging applications. These multidisciplinary researchers will acquire a solid multidisciplinary scientific and technical training in the field of nanoscale microwave technologies enabling them to generate new knowledge beyond the current state of the art and with the skills to transfer this knowledge into novel microwave applications in the semiconductor and life science sectors, specifically, in nano-electronics, nano-spintronics, nano-biology and nano-medicine.

Microwave technologies have a tremendous impact in societies as they constitute the basis of communication, remote sensing and navigation systems. In addition, they are widely used as power sources in food and materials industries, in plasma processing techniques in the semiconductor industry and as surgical tools in medicine. In all these applications engineers make use of the special propagation properties of microwaves, their short wavelengths, wide bandwidths and the existence of molecular, atomic or nuclear resonances at those frequencies. A common aspect of all existing applications is that they exploit the properties of microwaves interacting with objects of a size comparable or greater to their wave lengths, i.e. centimetres (cm) to millimetres (mm). With the advent of Nanotechnologies the possibility to explore the interactions of microwaves with much smaller objects (micrometres to nanometres) is emerging as an exciting field of research and technology development. The near field properties of microwaves (relevant at distances several times smaller than their wave length) together with the relevance of quantum and semi classical interactions opens-up phenomena that are expected to give rise to new applications in fields of application such as electronics, biology, spintronics or medicine.