News
AMOLF researchers Lukas Helmbrecht and Wim Noorduin have developed a reactive ink that can be painted on an equally reactive canvas. The ink reacts with the material on the canvas to become a semiconductor that emits colored light, an essential part of electronic components such as LEDs. Consequently, a new way of producing these electronic components is now within reach. The results of the research, a collaboration between the AMOLF groups Self-Organizing Matter and Hybrid Solar Cells, are published this week in the journal ‘Advanced Materials’.
To survive and prosper living cells continually have to respond and adapt to changes in their environment. To this end, they have developed sensing systems that rival the best man-made sensing devices. Yet, how accurately these systems can measure chemical concentrations remains poorly understood. Researchers from AMOLF have now developed a theory that predicts the optimal design that maximizes the sensing precision of these systems. An analysis of experimental data revealed that the sensing system of the bacterium E. coli obeys the design principles as predicted by their theory. The AMOLF team presented their work in the journal eLife.
AMOLF researchers Erik Garnett, Susan Rigter, and colleagues are the first to have irrefutably demonstrated that amorphous perovskite exists. The material can significantly increase the efficiency of solar cells produced from perovskite. The research is published today online in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.
On May 1st, Wiebke Albrecht will start at AMOLF as tenure track group leader. Her research group Hybrid Nanosystems will be embedded in the Designer Matter research theme at AMOLF. With her group, Albrecht will investigate the interaction between different components in complex hybrid nanosystems, such as metal-semiconductor nanostructures. By combining advanced electron microscopy and single particle optical spectroscopy on the same nanoparticle, she will be able to unravel the interplay of morphology and underlying charge and energy transfer processes. The ultimate goal is to develop new concepts of hybrid architectures, responsive to external stimuli, with properties specifically tailored for applications in solar energy harvesting and quantum information processing.
Photonic topological insulators are currently at the forefront of on-chip photonic research due to their potential for loss-free information transport. Realized in photonic crystals, they enable robust propagation of optical states along domain walls. But how robust is robust? In order to answer this, researchers from AMOLF and TU Delft quantified photonic edge state transport using phase-resolved near-field optical microscopy. The findings provide a crucial step towards error-free integrated photonic quantum networks. The results were published in the journal Light Science & Applications.
AMOLF director Huib Bakker has been re-installed by the NWO-I Foundation Board for a period of five years.
Wim Noorduin has been appointed professor by special appointment of Self-Organizing Matter at the Faculty of Science at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). The chair was established on behalf of the Foundation for the Advancement of Atomic and Molecular Physics (‘Stichting tot bevordering van de Atoom- en Molecuulfysica’). Noorduin will continue at AMOLF as leader of the Self-Organizing Matter group.
The European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme has awarded a FET Proactive grant to a consortium of 8 European institutions to develop new ways to perform electron microscopy. AMOLF is one of the partners in the Electron Beams Enhancing Analytical Microscopy (eBEAM) consortium. The total budget is 5 M€.
Imagine if a material would arrange itself into a shape suited for its application. It may result in a catalyst that maximizes its own surface area for improved efficiency or a micro-actuator that forms appendages to grab nearby objects. This is the promise that self-assembly holds: making complex, functional materials by letting matter shape itself. Yet, not all matter that self-assembles into interesting forms turns out to have a useful function in its final shape. Researchers of the Self-Organizing Matter group recently discovered that ion exchange allows them to separate the self-assembly process from the resulting material. Their findings were published in Advanced Materials on November 16th and highlighted in Nature and Nature Reviews Materials.
At the 2020 Virtual MRS Fall Meeting, PhD student Susan Rigter has won two awards with her poster Amorphous Halide Perovskite Thin Films. First, the Materials Research Society announced that she had won the Best Poster Award in the symposium, followed by the news that she was also shortlisted for best poster at the overall conference sponsored by ACS Energy Letters. Like a cherry on the cake, Rigter also received this second prize for her poster.
Much like investors on the stock market, cell populations prepare for changes in the environment by spreading the risk. The tool box they use contains a repertoire of sensory receptors on the surface of individual cells. These receptors can be tweaked to make individual members of the population responsive to different environmental signals. It was thought that cells could only modify this diversity relatively slowly, by producing new receptor proteins or degrading them. Scientists at AMOLF (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) and Yale University (New Haven, CT) now report the discovery of a mechanism that enables cell populations to tune their diversity much faster, by a combination of physical and chemical interactions between existing proteins. The findings are published in the journal Science Advances on November 13th.
Bas Overvelde (Soft Robotic Matter) has been appointed as part-time associate professor at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). While his group and lab will stay at AMOLF, he will spend one day a week at the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems (ICMS). Overvelde wishes to initiate new collaborations with TU/e researchers, especially in the field of Soft Robotics.