The ultimate goal of the project is to realise a new miniaturised and ultra-sensitive magnetometer that can be used in space on all kinds of platforms, including nanosatellites. This new magnetometer, called MAROT (Low noise MAgnetometeR based On Tunnel junctions), is based on improved magnetic tunnel junctions. Compared to state-of-the-art magnetometers used in space, this...
We live in the information age where we rely on the creation, detection, and distribution of short light pulses forming the Internet. The demand for high data throughput has pushed the speed of laser modulators and detectors close to the 1 ps time limit. However, to reach these speeds, current telecom detectors require at least...
Annually 31.5 million people develop sepsis, a life-threatening organ dysfunction caused by a dysregulated host response to infection. Approximately 5.3 million people die yearly due to sepsis, among them 420,000 neonates. The majority of epidemiological studies on sepsis, or blood stream infections, focus either on bacteria or fungi and combined analyses are sparse. A global...
Dementia is a devastating age-related disease with important public health challenges. Worldwide cost of dementia exceeds US$ 800 billion. Every 3 seconds a new case of dementia is diagnosed and the number of patients will almost double to 82 million by 2030. Up to 75% of patients with dementia have Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Accumulation of...
The aim of this project is to develop a new x-ray micro computed tomography (micro-CT) technique that will allow performing high-resolution scans with significantly less radiation dose than conventional machines. In the latter, dose generally increases cubically with increasing the spatial resolution; therefore, high-resolution scans require high doses. This means that such scans are not applicable to...
The ALL project is centred on bringing ground breaking adaptive liquid crystal lenses recently developed by the UPM to a state of maturity by which the technology can be transferred from the academic to an industrial environment for further development. The technology developed by the UPM, patent pending, is based on generating high performing lenses, with unprecedented tuning...
Air quality directly impacts our health and the health of the planet, yet it remains a matter of global and individual concern. Today, 91% of the world’s population live where atmospheric pollution reaches harmful levels and the average global temperature is on the rise, changing the climate in yet unknown ways. Cities are at the...
Natural gas (i.e. methane) is a key resource for the energy and fuel market of the next two decades. Above all, methane as a fossil fuel has a lower carbon footprint than coal and oil, so it is going to play a fundamental role in the transition to renewables. Furthermore, it can be easily replaced with biomethane....
The goal of the proposed project is to develop a differential mobility spectrometry-based technology for label-free molecular imaging and to pilot its applications in biological tissue analysis. Successful project would lay the foundation for widespread use of label-free molecular imaging that would revolutionise analysis of tissues by allowing large-scale adoption and realise unforeseen applications also outside the medical area....
Safe environmental conditions and environmental monitoring have great importance in our life. The early detection of dangerous events, such as earthquakes, large-scale fires, appearing of poisoning or flammable gases, water and soil pollutions are critical to prevent oncoming cataclysms. Here we propose an integrated smart device that can be part of a network, capable to detect any...
Hardware trojans (HT) impact our everyday life and may even cause life threatening situations. Unlike other errors and malfunctions, Trojans are inserted deliberately. Apart from insider attacks, the economically driven outsourcing of production steps to third party contractors enlarges the attack surface dramatically. Ideally, any undesired modification made to an IC should be detectable by presilicon verification/simulation and post-silicon...
Much of the knowledge that we have from our world stems from the analysis of images. Using optics and cameras, we can map how much light a sample absorbs or how by how quickly the light propagates in a medium (both together are described by the complex refractive index). From these spectral properties, we can...
3D-META proposes an entirely new principle for beam steering of relevance to 3D imaging with lidar microsensors. Our proposed mechanism avoids the fundamental limitations associated with current MEMS tip-tilt micromirrors by instead using MEMS to tune the electromagnetic properties of gap surface plasmon metasurfaces. Using such dynamic metasurfaces we target a factor 10 increase in scanning angle range...
Optical sensing is a vast and rapidly expanding field, demanding future applications require revolutionary sensors with high detection efficiency, high time resolution, spectral resolution, and statistical analysis of light. There are however no detectors currently available offering all these features simultaneously. In INSPECT we will combine integrated photonics with superconducting detector technology to realise a...
We aim to combine recent breakthroughs in magnetic sensing technology and functional neuroimaging system design for beyond state-of-the-art investigations of the human brain in health and disease. The technical breakthrough consists of nano-fabricated high critical-temperature (high-Tc) junctions that yield superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) magnetometers that are simpler to fabricate, enable more flexibility in design,...
FastPix is a reconfigurable low light-level (LLL) hybrid sensor that can be scaled to arbitrarily large areas and that aims to detect the time of arrival of single photons with a time resolution (SPTR) close to 10 ps. The FastPix performance will be at least one order of magnitude better than any existing technology in time, spatial...
Recently, we proposed a novel imaging method which combines two different concepts; coded aperture imaging and incoherent digital holography. This combination opens new world of 3D imaging with interesting unexpected features. The new imaging concept is dubbed interferenceless coded aperture correlation holography (I-COACH). In I-COACH, modulating a single beam with a codded phase mask yields...
X-ray tomography is an incredibly useful diagnostic tool in various sectors of medicine. However, the typical radiation dose the patient absorbs during a ct scan is quite high, so that less informative tools must be often used instead. A drastic reduction of the radiation dose would open x-ray tomography to vast new applications, e.g. preventive...
The vision PRIMELOC envisions a future where location-based services, enabled outdoor by Galileo or GPS, will be widely provided also in indoor spaces, thanks to the availability of automatically generated maps and infrastructure-less localisation inside buildings. In this project, we devise the new concept of personal radar as a fundamental step toward this goal. This concept stems...
Microscopy (whether using neutral systems, such as photons or atoms, or charged systems, such as electrons) requires the ability to “optically” manipulate low energy particles, through a series of “lenses” that are used to focus a beam and scan it across a surface (except in the case of atomic force microscopy, where the divergently emitting...
