News
AMOLF researcher Wim Noorduin and fellow scientists Nadir Kaplan, Joanna Aizenberg and L. Mahadevan of Harvard University have developed a model that can be used to accurately describe and predict the formation of a broad range of exquisite three-dimensional crystal structures. This provides the basis for a new, cheap and versatile production method for the manufacture of functional materials, such as light guides for solar cells. The research team presents its results on March 31st in Science.
How embryos develop into complex, adult organisms is still a mystery, but researchers at AMOLF have managed to clarify a small part of it. While studying the nematode C. elegans, they discovered how a group of cells always develops into the same organ despite considerable variations at the cell level. With their experiments, group leader Jeroen van Zon and PhD researcher Guizela Huelsz-Prince have made the responsible feedback mechanism, also referred to as canalisation, visible for the first time. They published their results on February 22nd in the journal Cell Systems.
AMOLF Postdoc Konrad Meister has been selected for the 67th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting that will be held from 25 until 30 June, 2017. Once every year, 30–40 Nobel Laureates come together in the German lakeside town of Lindau to meet the next generation of leading scientists. This year the meeting is dedicated to chemistry and 400 – 500 young scientists from all over the world were chosen to attend. Meister is looking forward to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and to discuss and mingle with the Nobel Lauretares and scientists on the picturesque island in Germany.
IOP, the publisher of New Journal of Physics decided to confer an Outstanding Referee Award for 2016 on Femius Koenderink. Many thanks to IOP for recognising their Referees, and for…
On february 15th, my colleague Bruno Ehrler and I explained the physics, technology and economoy of solar power, LED lights and optical communications to an audience of 45 primary school…
Scientists have developed a material that breaks one of the fundamental principles governing many physical systems. Ordinary materials transmit external forces equally, no matter where the pressure comes from. The newly developed material breaks this rule and could potentially be of interest in soft-robotics or shock absorption related applications. The research team from AMOLF, Leiden University and the University of Texas at Austin published their findings on 13 February in Nature.
During his PhD research at Harvard University, AMOLF group leader Bas Overvelde developed a smart method for designing and investigating new metamaterials. For such materials the microstructure determines the function, rather than the molecular composition. The ideal metamaterial changes shape autonomously to achieve the desired functionality. Overvelde and his American colleagues developed a toolkit to design such metamaterials that can assume different shapes in a manner reminiscent of origami. They published their research on 19 January 2017 in Nature.
On January 13th Carien Groot successfully defended her PhD thesis Dynamics of water interacting with biomolecules at the University of Amsterdam. She obtained the cum laude degree for her doctorate research in the Ultrafast Spectroscopy group of Huib Bakker. This degree is reserved for the top 5% of students.
Physicists at AMOLF have unraveled the mysterious working mechanism of a promising new class of materials for solar cells. Their pressure experiments with perovskite semiconductors had very counter-intuitive results, which could not be explained by the theory for conventional semiconductors. However, the results matched surprisingly well with a novel theory developed at Imperial College in London, predicting a peculiar band structure in perovskite materials. “Theory and experiments came together perfectly and helped us solve an important part of the perovskite puzzle”, says AMOLF group leader Bruno Ehrler, who published the results in Energy & Environmental Science on 23 December 2016.
‘FOM Institute AMOLF’ becomes ‘AMOLF’ After a long preparation period FOM will discontinue on January 1st, 2017. The present FOM organization will form a new organization together with other parts…
Researchers in the Nanoscale Solar Cells group at AMOLF have recently published two papers, one in Nature Communications and one in Nanoscale, demonstrating new imaging techniques for investigating the nanoscale properties of materials.
On December 6th Sander Mann successfully defended his PhD thesis Quantifying limits and losses in nanoscale photovoltaics at the University of Amsterdam. He obtained the cum laude degree for his doctorate research in the Nanoscale Solar Cells group led by Erik Garnett. This degree is reserved for the top 5% of students. Mann was Garnett’s first PhD student.