During the last two decades, a revolutionary scientific new age, based on the capacity to observe, characterize, manipulate and organize matter in the nanometric scale, is appearing. In this scale, physics, chemistry, materials science, computational theory, and engineering converge towards the same theoretical principles and experimental findings that are basically governed by the laws of the Quantum Mechanics. Nanotechnology involves these interdisciplinary knowledge areas and methodologies in order to study, manufacture and characterize functional structures with dimensions of tens of nanometers.
The thirteen year-old NanoSpain network aims to agglutinate and coordinate the efforts made in the field of the Nanotechnology by Spanish groups from universities, research institutes and companies. Moreover, this network has tried to help the government institutions in defining potential actions and plans referring to this area. Currently the NanoSpain network, comprising 360 Spanish groups with near 3000 researchers in total, is one of the widest Spanish scientific networks.
As a direct and most effective way to enhance the interaction between our network members, a first network meeting was organised in San Sebastian (March 10-12, 2004) with around 210 participants registered. Due to this success, the network decided organising its annual meeting, Barcelona (March 14-17,2005), Pamplona (March 20-23, 2006), Seville (March, 12-15, 2007), Braga-Portugal (April 14-18, 2008), Zaragoza (March 09-12, 2009), Malaga (March 09-12, 2010), Bilbao (April 11-14, 2011) Santander (February 27 - March 01, 2012) Bilbao (April 23-26, 2013), Madrid (March 11-14, 2014) Bilbao (April 10-13, 2015) and LogroƱo (March 15-18, 2016) with a similar format.
Its objective was also to facilitate the dissemination of knowledge and promote interdisciplinary discussions among the different NanoSpain groups. In order to organise the various sessions and to select contributions, the meeting was structured in the following thematic lines, but interactions among them were promoted: :
1. Advanced Nanofabrication Methods
2. NanoBiotechnology
3. NanoMaterials
4. NanoChemistry
5. NanoElectronics / Molecular Electronics
6. Scanning Probe Microscopies (SPM)
7. Nanophotonic & Nanooptic
8. Scientific infrastructures and Scientific Parks
9. Simulation at the nanoscale