The goal of the NanoX EUR project is to boost high level collaborative research and education actions in the area of Nanoscale Science and Engineering in Toulouse. NanoX aims at promoting Toulouse as one of the world’s highest quality research and education centers in a challenging and promising scientific field expected to give rise to diverse innovations and industrial applications in the near future. The great international attractiveness of this EUR and its structuring effect will result from ambitious and intimately bound research and education actions.

NanoX is grounded on the Nano, EXtreme measurements & Theory (NEXT) LABEX. Created in 2011, NEXT involves 6 laboratories on the Toulouse Campus (450 persons including 200 permanent scientists from CNRS, UPS, INSA), working at the frontier of knowledge in the domains of nanophysics and nanochemistry, condensed and soft matter physics, optics, and atomic/cluster physics... The specificity and the strength of the NEXT project in the highly competing international context are linked to its pluridisciplinarity: (i) one quarter of the staff consists of chemists, who work hand-in-hand with physicists and (ii) a strong interplay links experimental and theoretical teams.

To ensure the continuity of the international leadership of the NEXT teams for the next 10 years, key scientific challenges will be tackled: new 2D materials and spintronic devices, innovative cold atom optics devices, single molecule manipulation, very high magnetic field measurements, advanced multiscale computational methods and their applications. Four strategic priorities have been identified to achieve these objectives:

• Increasing the number of international collaborations with 6 strategic academic partners;
• Fostering research projects with industrial partners, including the 15 companies that support the NanoX project, in particular the Toulouse high-tech companies in aeronautics and space (Airbus, Thales Alenia Space, CNES, …);
• Reinforcing research projects with other Toulouse teams of excellence;
• Strengthening common experimental and theoretical facilities.

This new dynamic will also leverage in the domain of education, which is of primary concern to the NEXT community since its creation. NEXT has funded major actions at the PhD and master levels and their success drives NEXT to build a new ambitious, innovative and high level “Graduate School” initiative, well beyond the NEXT perimeter. Within the NanoX EUR, NEXT and the Graduate School will share similar goals and governance principles, in the research and education domains respectively. The graduate school will involve approximately 500 master students belonging to (i) three master degrees of the University Paul Sabatier (master in Physics, master in Chemistry, master in Materials Science and Engineering), (ii) the Engineering degree in Materials Science of the INP-ENSIACET “Grande Ecole”, and  (iii) the Physical Engineering Degree of the INSA “Grande Ecole”. It will also involve the ~400 PhD students enrolled in the Doctoral School Sciences of Matter.

The main educational actions of the EUR will consist in:

• offering incoming mobility master scholarships to highly ranked foreign students;
• fostering the outgoing mobility of domestic master and PhD students (in R&D industry or academic laboratories abroad);
• promoting industry-linked or academic-linked sandwich courses;
• extending the accessibility to research technical centers;
• developing new interdisciplinary and advanced courses, both at the master and doctorate level.

In the middle term, this project will lead to a fully coordinated “NanoX” Master offer in Toulouse.