News
By converting one high-energy light particle into two low energy particles, singlet fission makes high energy photons available for solar cells
The more complex the object, the harder it is to fold up. Space satellites often need many small motors to fold up an instrument, and people have difficulty simply folding up a roadmap. Physicists from Leiden and Amsterdam have now designed a structure that folds itself up in several steps. The results from this research will be published in Nature on September 27, 2018.
On September 1st, Kristina Ganzinger will start as tenure track group leader. Ganzinger comes to AMOLF with a WISE fellowship, which is part of an NWO program for excellent female researchers. With her research group Physics of Cellular Interactions, she reinforces the Living Matter department headed by Gijsje Koenderink.
An international team of scientists has investigated a new type of charge carrier-selective contact for nanowire solar cells based on the surface-gate effect. Those contacts make use of an effect that is ubiquitous in every computer chip. In a field-effect transistor, a surface gate modulates the conductivity of the underlying semiconductor, allowing control over the current flow between the source and drain terminals. Now, the scientists are able to translate this concept to nanowire solar cells by making use of a surface layer to control the conductivity of the nanowire next to a metal point contact. The researchers from AMOLF, the University of Oregon, Eindhoven University of Technology and Delft University of Technology published their results on August 14th, 2018 in the journal Nature Communications.
Anybody who has experienced jet lag knows the power of the biological clock. Almost all organisms, from humans to the smallest of bacteria, have a built-in system that tells them whether it is time to rest or to be active. Most biological clocks ‘tick’ autonomously, but some bacteria depend on light to synchronize their clock every day. Using mathematical calculations, researchers from AMOLF and the University of Michigan have now demonstrated that an autonomous clock suffers far less from noise, such as fluctuations in sunlight due to clouds. The research results were published online on August 14th 2018 in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.
Academic-industry collaboration leads to product on the market in two years
Bruno Ehrler (group leader Hybrid Solar Cells) has won the WIN Rising Star Award of the year 2018. The prize is a new initiative from the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology (WIN), part of the Canadian University of Waterloo on the occasion of the 10 year anniversary of the WIN. As the inaugural winner, Ehrler received the prize in recognition of his contributions to the advancement of novel solar cell materials and devices.
Researchers at AMOLF have found a way of making calcium carbonate structures, such as a sea urchin skeleton, suitable for use in electronics. They do this by modifying the composition of the material so that it becomes a semiconductor without losing its shape. This research was published in the journal Nature Chemistry on June 4th 2018.
Stillness rules the eye of a hurricane; without a hurricane no eye, and without an eye no hurricane. In a similar manner, physicists of research institute AMOLF, the University of Amsterdam and the University of Texas at Austin, have captured light in the eye of an optical vortex. “The light could move in any direction but does not do so,” says researcher Hugo Doeleman. The research will be published on June 4th in the top journal Nature Photonics.
AMOLF group leader Wim Noorduin is one of the 86 researchers who received a NWO Vidi grant that is worth 800.000 euros. This grant allows Noorduin to further expand his research on versatile growth for functional materials.
Femius Koenderink (head of the AMOLF Center for Nanophotonics) is the winner of the 2018 ACS Photonics Young Investigator Award Lectureship. This lectureship honors the contributions to the photonics research field of a researcher that is in the first 5 to 10 years of his or her career.
AMOLF develops a magnet-free optical circulator
Circulators are important components in communication technology. Their unique way of routing light usually requires centimeter-sized magnets, which are difficult to miniaturize for use on optical chips. Researchers at AMOLF and the University of Texas have circumvented this problem with a vibrating glass ring that interacts with light. They thus created a microscale circulator that directionally routes light on an optical chip without using magnets. The researchers publish their work in Nature Communications on 4 May 2018.