This review summarizes the main concepts, technologies and recent reports that allow interconnecting printing technologies with magnetoactive materials.

Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are currently the fastest growing segment of the global battery market, and the preferred electrochemical energy storage system for portable applications. Magnetism is one of the forces that can be applied improve performance, since the application of magnetic fields influences electrochemical reactions through variation of electrolyte properties, mass transportation, electrode kinetics, and deposits morphology. This review provides a description of the magnetic forces present in electrochemical reactions and focuses on how those forces may be taken advantage of to influence the LIBs components (electrolyte, electrodes, and active materials), improving battery performance. The different ways that magnetic forces can interact with LIBs components are discussed, as well as their influence on the electrochemical behavior. The suitable control of these forces and interactions can lead to higher performance LIBs structures and to the development of innovative concepts.

The crossover from antidot to dot magnetic behavior on arrays patterned in a ferromagnetic thin film has been achieved by modifying only the geometry. A series of antidot arrays has been fabricated on cobalt with fixed diameter $d$ and by reducing the period of the array $p$ from $p\gg d$ to $p<d$. A dramatic change in the coercivity dependence with $p$, correlated with a significant modification in the magnetic domain structure observed by x-ray photoemission electron microscopy, evidences the crossover. An intermediate regime has been found between the superdomain structure present in antidot arrays and the array of astroid-state noncorrelated dots. The study has been reproduced for a different ferromagnetic material, permalloy, and supported by micromagnetic simulations. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.89.144405 ©2014 American Physical Society

Smartphones are becoming increasingly versatile thanks to the wide variety of sensor and actuator systems packed in them. Mobile devices today go well beyond their original purpose as communication devices, and this enables important new applications, ranging from augmented reality to the Internet of Things. Personalized diagnostics is one of the areas where mobile devices can have the greatest impact. Hitherto, the camera and communication abilities of these devices have been barely exploited for point of care (POC) purposes. This short review covers the recent evolution of mobile devices in the area of POC diagnostics and puts forward some ideas that may facilitate the development of more advanced applications and devices in the area of personalized diagnostics. With this purpose, the potential exploitation of wireless power and actuation of sensors and biosensors using near field communication (NFC), the use of the screen as a light source for actuation and spectroscopic analysis, using the haptic module to enhance mass transport in micro volumes, and the use of magnetic sensors are discussed.

Spin-torque nano-oscillators (STO) are candidates for the next technological implementation of spintronic devices in commercial electronic systems. For use in microwave applications, improving the noise figures by efficient control of their phase dynamics is a mandatory requirement. In order to achieve this, we developed a compact phase locked loop (PLL) based on custom integrated circuits (ICs) and demonstrate that it represents an efficient way to reduce the phase noise level of a vortex based STO. The advantage of our approach to phase stabilize STOs is that our compact system is highly reconfigurable e.g. in terms of the frequency divider ratio N, RF gain and loop gain. This makes it robust against device to device variations and at the same time compatible with a large range of STOs. Moreover, by taking advantage of the natural highly non-isochronous nature of the STO, the STO frequency can be easily controlled by e.g. changing the divider ratio N.

Permalloy antidot thin films were grown by sputtering onto anodic alumina templates, replicating their hexagonal order inside micrometric geometric domains. The advanced high-spatial and sensitive x-ray photoemission electron microscopy technique under an applied magnetic field has enabled magnetic domain structure imaging and quantitative hysteresis loop analysis inside nanoscale regions with geometric order and at border regions. The study has been complemented by vibrating sample magnetometry and magneto-optic Kerr effect measurements. The magnetization process is clearly determined by the geometry characteristics of the antidot arrays. Inside geometric ordered domains, the strength of effective in-plane magnetic anisotropy depends on the antidot diameter\char21{}to\char21{}film thickness ratio, which determines the partial balance between stray fields generated by magnetic charges at the lateral surface of the antidots and those at the upper\char21{}bottom film surface. In addition, the border regions between geometric domains act as pinning centers for magnetization reversal and eventually generate a harder magnetic region.