The NFFA-Europe PILOT project has been launched, the extension to 2026 of NFFA-Europe, whose first five-year term ended on February 28, 2021.
NFFA-Europe is a distributed research infrastructure that integrates nanofoundries (synthesis and manipulation of nanostructures) with fine analysis available at European large-scale facilities, creating a unique offer for the nanosciences and nanomaterials community. Since March 1st the consortium has been extended from nineteen to twenty-two beneficiaries and also includes nine “third parties” as scientific service providers, including the operando optical characterization infrastructures and a nanoscale-resolved Raman spectroscopy (TERS) system of the Nanoionics and Fuel Cells group at IREC.
The project, funded by the European Union with the Horizon 2020 call INFRAIA-03-2020: Pilot for a new model of Integrating Activities, is coordinated by Cnr-Iom. The beneficiaries include academic laboratories and SMEs from nine Member States of the European Union (France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden) and from Switzerland, while there are three international organizations. Third parties also introduce new specialized services in the offer of Transnational Access.
NFFA-EUROPE PILOT (NEP) aims at expanding and consolidating the operation of a Interoperable Distributed Research Infrastructure for Nanoscience (IDRIN) supporting research on materials and functional systems at the nanoscale and at the microscale. NEP provides a unique overarching offer of experimental and theoretical facilities to be combined to suit user needs ranging from materials synthesis, growth, nanofabrication to nanocharacterization, microscopy and spectroscopies also with fine analysis methods at large scale and neutron radiation sources, and to numerical simulation.
The transnational access is proposed in modalities that help coping with the post COVID-19 conditions of restricted user mobility: interactive remote access (IRA) will be available from the beginning in some TA facilities and will be further generalized through the Joint Activities along with innovative Virtual Access and pilots of FAIR-by-design data generation. The construction of the IDRIN will address the issues for Long Term Sustainability of the NEP infrastructure services.
The project is coordinated by CNR (Italy) and involves 21 partners across Europe, where IREC is a third party. The overall budget of NFFA-Europe is ~15 M€, started in March 2021 and will run for 5 years until February 2026.
Find out more information in the links to the project website and cordis.
This research project has received funding from the EU’s H2020 framework programme for research and innovation under grant agreement 101007417 (NFFA-Europe-Pilot).
