News
Water droplets float in a hot pan because of the so-called Leidenfrost effect. Now physicists from AMOLF and Leiden University have discovered a variation: the Elastic Leidenfrost effect. It explains why so called hydrogel balls jump around on a hot plate making high pitched sounds. The explanation appears in Nature Physics on July 24.
Periodic arrays of plasmonic nanoantennas can enhance the directionality of light emission of nearby fluorophores. Unfortunately, their narrow spectral bandwidth and the anisotropy of their optical resonances limit the use…
On July 1st, Ewold Verhagen was appointed professor of Nano-optomechanics at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). At TU/e Verhagen is part of the research group Photonics and Semiconductor Nanophysics (PSN) within the department of Applied Physics.
Verhagen will continue working at AMOLF as group leader of the Photonic Forces group. AMOLF and TU/e expect the appointment to further strengthen their research collaboration.
Researchers demonstrate record strong conversion of motion into light
AMOLF researchers have developed nanoscale strings whose motion can be converted to light signals with unprecedented strength. This could allow for extremely precise sensors and comes with an important side-effect. “Analogous to a guitar amplifier in overdrive producing distorted sound waves, our strong motion-to-light conversion leads to distorted light signals”, says group leader Ewold Verhagen. “But these signals actually carry information about the motion that may lead to new ways of measuring quantum mechanical motion.” The researchers published their results on 7 July 2017 in Nature Communications.
Water splitting with solar energy could provide an efficient route for large scale renewable energy conversion and storage. Scientists from TU Delft and AMOLF have now engineered a very efficient and stable photoelectrode, a material that absorbs light and directly splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. Furthermore, they use silicon wafers as the light absorbing material, so the system is also cheap. They report on their findings in Nature Communications on Thursday, June 29th.
AMOLF group leader Bruno Ehrler has been awarded with an NWO Vidi grant. The grant enables Ehrler to study a promising new material for solar cells. NWO has awarded a total of 89 experienced researchers a Vidi grant that is worth 800.000 euros.
Researchers from AMOLF and Swiss EPFL have shown that the surface of minuscule water drops surrounded by a hydrophobic substance such as oil is surprisingly ordered. At room temperature, the surface water molecules of these droplets have much stronger interactions than at a normal water surface. This may shed new light on a variety of atmospheric, biological and even geological processes.
Solar cells need monocrystalline materials to work optimally. But the traditional way to build monocrystalline materials is highly time consuming. AMOLF physicists in the Nanoscale Solar Cells group have found a new way of building them, which is at least a hundred times more efficient. This research has been published in the journal Advanced Materials on 3 May 2017.
The Dutch research consortium BaSyC is taking on the challenge of building a synthetic biological cell. For part of its funding, it has received a grant worth almost € 19 million from the Gravitation programme of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). The research partners will themselves be funding the remaining six million of the total of over € 25 million that the research programme will cost. AMOLF, together with five universities, is taking part in the consortium that is led by TU Delft. ‘A fundamental understanding of life within a cell will bring huge intellectual, scientific and technological rewards.’
The skin of a fungus consists of protein molecules called hydrophobins that together form a protective film. These hydrophobin films show an exceptionally large elasticity and are highly water-repellent, thus forming a natural rain coat. The origin of these special properties are a mystery. Researchers from AMOLF have succeeded to study the properties of hydrophobin films at the molecular-level using advanced interfacial spectroscopy. Together with colleagues from Finland and a research group of the University of Amsterdam (UvA), the researchers describe their findings in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.
How can molecular systems or cells be used to perform complex computational tasks? And what is the lowest amount of energy needed to execute such operations? Group leader Pieter Rein ten Wolde from AMOLF recently published two articles together with his colleague Thomas Ouldridge of the Imperial College London, in which they provide first clues on how to construct a biochemical system that is able to copy and transfer information in an energy efficient way.
The Perspective paper “single photon nano-antennas” in ACS Photonics reviews the use of plasmon antennas for single-photon applications. The idea to use plasmon antennas for single-photon sources was first conceived…