News
Today, the KNAW presented the new Faces of Science, and AMOLF researcher Tom Aarts (Physics of Cellular Interactions) is one of them.
We are honored to announce that AMOLF group leader Said Rodriguez has been appointed Professor of ‘Emergence and information in light’ as of 1 April 2025. His Chair by special appointment is embedded in the Debye Institute for Nanomaterials Science of the University of Utrecht.
AMOLF postdoc Fanny Thorimbert (Nanoscale Solar Cells) received the prize for best PhD thesis from the French C’Nano, which is a national competency cluster in Nanoscience that is part of the CNRS research organization. The announcement was made at the annual C’Nano conference, held in Paris, on the 20th of March.
A study published online in Nature on February 26th has revealed how plants and fungi construct networks that operate as hyper-efficient ‘supply chains,’ moving billions of tons of CO2 underground. By building a robot (Aretha), which tracks over half a million fungal ’roadways’ simultaneously, researchers Tom Shimizu (AMOLF/Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Toby Kiers (SPUN/Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Howard Stone (Princeton University) and collaborators succeeded in mapping and tracking these nutrient-exchange networks that help regulate Earth’s ecosystems and carbon cycles. With atmospheric CO2 levels rising, the collected data is becoming increasingly important.
In the past three months, three AMOLF PhD students successfully defended their thesis at a Dutch university. Their names are Christiaan van Campenhout, Susan Rigter and Balázs Antalicz.
Yesterday, Wim Noorduin demonstrated the lead detection test developed by him and his research team on the Dutch-language TV program ‘WNL op Zondag’. NWO president Marcel Levi, a regular guest on the show, had invited Wim to join him in sharing the fascinating story of his discovery.
Universal and easy-to-measure warning signals for catastrophic damage occur in the metals used to transport data in computer chips. That is what ARCNL PhD student Ester Abram discovered and described in a recent paper in the Journal of Applied Physics. “A slight increase in the observed reflectivity of the metal indicates that its morphology is starting to change as a result of exposure to laser light.”
Scientists of the University of Twente, research institute AMOLF and the University of Oxford have developed a way to create highly ordered semiconductor material at room temperature. This research, which was led by the University of Twente, was published in the scientific journal
On January 8th, a delegation led by the Netherlands’ Climate Envoy, Jaime de Bourbon de Parme, visited the AMOLF lab of Tom Shimizu. Researchers in Tom’s group are developing new robotic imaging technologies to study fungal networks. Over the past few years, Tom and his collaborator Toby Kiers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and The Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) have made significant progress in understanding how these networks function.
The EQUSPACE consortium has been awarded 3.2 million euros from the European Innovation Council’s (EIC) Pathfinder Open funding program to pioneer quantum technologies in silicon. The group of Ewold Verhagen at AMOLF is one of the five European partners of the consortium, led by the University of Jyväskylä, which aims to develop a new type of silicon quantum platform.
On January 2, group leader Bas Overvelde appeared on the TV program Het Klokhuis. In the program, which is aimed at children, Bas explained what soft robots are and what they can do.
With the year ending, AMOLF reflects on a festive year in which it celebrated its 75th anniversary. AMOLF director Huib Bakker and institute manager Paula van Tijn share their memories and thoughts.