Development of new inorganic functional materials and tuning of selected properties through the modification of the chemical composition by anion substitution and of the microstructure. The activities are focused in three important groups of materials with recent interest: functional nitride-based materials, inorganic battery materials and electrolytes, carbon nanomaterials and inorganic nanostructures.

Area Global: MATERIA SP (2018-2021, updated 29 /03/2019) The Nanoparticles and Nanocomposites Group (www.icmab.es/nn) is currently formed by three researchers, one post-doc, nine PhD students, three MSc students and two undergraduates. Group members have backgrounds in physics, chemistry, nanoscience, biomedicine and biotechnology.

SUMAN (www.icmab.es/suman) research focuses on the study of nanostructured functional oxides grown from chemical solutions. The major effort is on superconducting materials, including high throughput growth methods for thin films, nanocomposites and coated conductors, ink-jet deposition and combinatorial approaches for fast screening, search of new mechanism for vortex pinning and their correlation with nanoscale strain and atomic defects. A crucial initiative is the customization of coated conductors and advanced characterization for their integration in large scale applications.

This group develops Boron Cluster Compounds and studies their structural and electronic implications. Boron clusters have a chemistry that could be as large as carbon chemistry. However, they are largely overlooked. They are considered structurally and electronically complicated, rare, unstable and expensive. This biased vision is widely extended, and prevents to tackle many urgent problems of our society and natural medium.

The research of the Crystallography group is devoted to the development and applications of diffraction methods in materials science. The activity is focused on X-ray diffraction, including synchrotron radiation, with some contributions to neutron and electron diffraction. It must be highlighted the development of new methodologies for the solution of the phase problem in crystallography that have been successfully applied to the analysis of powder and single crystal diffraction data.

The research of the group is devoted to a fundamental understanding of the physical, chemical, structural and electrical properties of surfaces and interfaces as well as processes taken place or emerging at them due to their low dimensionality. Our experimental approach spans a wide range of research areas including organic/inorganic interfaces, molecular self-assembly and the study of novel growth processes and interfacial phenomena.

The Reproductive Physiology and Environmental Epigenetics group includes the Group of Biology of Reproduction (GBR), established in 1997 and led by Francesc Piferrer, and the group of Molecular Endocrinology of Spermatogenesis (MES), established in 2022 and led by François Chauvigné. Our main goal is to do research on the reproductive physiology of fishes, focusing on sex determination and differentiation, and the regulation of sperm production and male function. We aim to understand both the internal and the environmental influences on these key processes for species survival.