Borja Cirera gets one of the competitive 'Atracción de Talento' fellowships from the Community of Madrid

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Borja Cirera is a Barcelonian researcher who has been working at the Interdisciplinary Studies based on Nanoscopic Systems group (ESISNA) in the Materials Science Institute since last year. Now, he just got one of the competitive 'Atracción de Talento' fellowships from the Community of Madrid to develop his own project for the next 5 years. His project, named PC-SOLAR, is based on investigating novel on-surface reactions triggered by visible light within plasmonic nanocavities.

Cirera is a young researcher who got his PhD on lanthanide-based nanoarchitectures on surfaces from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and then moved to the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin for his postdoc "to learn a new technique that allows investigating light-matter interactions at the atomic scale by illuminating the tunnelling junction of a scanning probe microscope (SPM) with different light sources", he explains.

His research has been focused on different bottom-up approaches that can tailor new low-dimensional materials with atomic precision, "from organic covalent polymers to metalorganic networks embedding rare earths", he says. "In addition to the local morphological and electronic characterization through SPM, in Berlin, I developed a novel system to investigate the vibrational properties at the atomic scale with tip-enhanced Raman spectromicroscopy", he adds, and mentions that this allowed him to access to a wide range of processes occurring at the interface between nanomaterials and surfaces, "such as how energy is injected and dissipated".

Now, it is time for his own project, and he is willing to. "I want to explore how we can use light not only to probe the local optoelectronic properties of materials, but to exploit it to direct nanofabrication with high spatial control and selectivity." The goal is to use this control "to steer reactions that yield atomically precise polymers on technologically relevant supports beyond metals."

Cirera is pretty sure he is in the place to be: "This institute and the ESISNA group have a strong multidisciplinary background on a range of fields and techniques that will be greatly beneficial to carry out my project, as they are at the frontiers of surface science, on-surface reactions and nanoplasmonics; with both experimental and theoretical experts." With them, besides working hard and investigating, Cirera is sharing time and hobies: "I hope to facilitate interactions with other scientists within the institute and cultivate a collaborative environment with my research".