A new international research project led by Irish researchers based in Amber, the materials science centre in Trinity, has been awarded over €4.4 million in funding for a new project working to improve magnetic technology in the hope of revolutionising wireless communications.
The project, Transpire, will be led by Prof Plamen Stamenov of Amber and the School of Physics in Trinity and will see collaboration with institutes in Germany, Norway and Switzerland. Transpire will develop a new class of magnetic materials that will enable data transfer of up to 1,000 times the current rate. Obvious applications of this new technology include medical imaging and spectrometry, geophysical and atmospheric research and the Internet of Things (IoT).
The project will be funded under the European Union’s Future and Emerging Technologies – Open (FET-Open), a highly competitive grant that funds high risk projects with the potential to produce radical new technologies. Success rates for FET-Open are generally low, with only 4 per cent of applications this round being successful.
In a press statement, Stamenov said they were “delighted to win this award”. He continued: “It is a recognition of the work we have done on the fundamental physics of highly spin-polarised materials over the last 5-10 years, but also of the quality and expertise of our collaborators in Germany, Norway and Switzerland. I trust that this project will be valued by the scientific community and hope that we will be laying the foundations for high-speed data networks of the future.”
The ultimate hope with the project is to develop a “technology which could underpin the next wave of the Big Data revolution”.
Amber has had unprecedented success recently in securing funding. Commenting on this, Prof Mark Ferguson, Director General of Science Foundation Ireland and Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government of Ireland, said in the statement: “This is a recognition of truly excellent science by Professor Stamenov and the team at AMBER. The Science Foundation Ireland Research Centres have ambitious targets of securing non-exchequer funding and AMBER has been very successful in reaching its targets to date.”
