Promotores: H. Schiessel, G.T. Barkema

During my PhD research, I studied the photon statistics of light emitted by a microcavity that contains a single quantum dot (QD) on resonance.

Promotor: Prof.dr. A. Achucarro

The way organisms develop from the initial single-cellular state to a complex final assembly like the human body, and how the final body is maintained throughout life, is one of the greatest mysteries and it’s understanding one of the biggest scientific challenges.

Promotor: C.W.J. Beenakker, Co-Promotor: A.R. Akhmerov

Promotor: T. Schmidt

In some condensed matter systems, such as the surface of a 3D topological insulator, the electrons are effectively massless and we must necessarily use the massless Dirac equation to describe them.

DNA carries various forms of information. Out of these forms of information the most well-known is classical genetic information.

Promotor: J.W.M. Frenken

The specialisation teaches you analytical frameworks and skills for managerial decision making. Internships help you decide whether you want to choose a career in industry or Physics research.

Promotores: Prof.dr. J. Aarts, Prof.dr. J.M. van Ruitenbeek

The four possible segments A, T, C and G that link together to form DNA molecules, and with their ordering encode genetic information, are not only different in name, but also in their physical and chemical properties.

Promotores: Prof.dr. G.W. Canters, Prof.dr. T.J. Aartsma

Promotor: A. Achúcarro, Co-promotor: A. Boyarsky

One of the most important correlation functions in physics, especially in cosmology, is the energy density, which describes how much energy is present at each point in spacetime due to matter fields. A key contribution to the energy density of the primordial universe comes from gravitational waves (GWs),…

The lipid membrane is a basic structural component of all living cells. Embedded in this nanometer-thin barrier, membrane proteins shape the membrane and at the same time respond to the shape of the membrane.

This thesis describes a study from both a theoreticaL and an experimental point of view.

Promotor: Prof.dr. M.L. van Hecke

Mechanical forces are known to play an important role in bacterial colonies. In this dissertation, we study the self-organization at various stages of growing bacterial colonies, and focus on the mechanical effects of cell growth.

Ferritin is a spherical metalloprotein, capable of storing and releasing iron in a controllable way. It is composed of a protein shell of about 12 nm and within its cavity, iron is stored in a mineral form.

Why do black holes emit thermal radiation? And how does a closed quantum system thermalize?

Zaanen

The ability to count is a property not often attributed to materials, despite the abundance of memory in materials. Regardless of how a material stores information, it is often difficult to retrieve exactly ‘what’ a material remembers.

Promotor: Prof.dr.ir. T.H. Oosterkamp, N. de Jonge

Molecular materials have been a subject of interest in fundamental research and applications for decades, and have been studied as bulk crystals, (thin) films and as individual molecules, due to the large variety in their properties. This dissertation explores pentacene crystals near the two-dimensional…

The quantum nature of matter and light has grown into a broad and fruitful research field for theorists and experimentalists alike. It combines foundational research with toward applications, the most well known of which is the quantum computer.

The overarching goal of this thesis is to set the foundations, but also make the first essential steps towards establishing a comprehensive, mesoscopic, hydrodynamic theory of epithelial tissues. The stage is set by an exhaustive study of topological defects in passive p-atic liquid crystals, singularities…

Promotor: Prof.dr. J. Zaanen, A. Parnachev

Promotor: J. Aarts

Electron microscopy has become an extremely important techniquein a wide variety of elds.

Single-molecule spectroscopy has become a powerful method for using organic fluorescent molecules in numerous applications.

In this thesis, we study systems of electrons in which strong correlations give rise to emergent exotic physics.

Promotor: J.M. van Ruitenbeek, Co-Promotor: S.J. van der Molen

Promotor: C. W. J. Beenakker, Yu. V. Nazarov, Co-promotor: J. Tworzydlo

Surface acoustic waves (SAWs) are mechanical waves that travel along the surface of a material and find many applications in modern technologies due to the ease of excitation on piezoelectric substrates via interdigital transducers (IDTs).

In condensed matter systems electron-electron interactions, negligible in everyday metals, can dramatically alter the electronic behavior of the system. Examples of such altered behavior include high-temperature superconductivity and modulation of the electron density.

With the help of quantum mechanics, digital quantum hardware may be able to tackle some of the problems that are too difficult for ordinary computers. But despite these expectations and the ongoing effort of the research community, reliable quantum computers are not yet realized in a lab setting.

Promotor: Prof.dr. M.L. van Hecke, Co-Promotor: Prof. dr. V. Vitelli

This thesis describes how to scale down concepts of macroscopic mechanical metamaterials to the thermal scale using a system of flexibly-linked colloids.

Promotor: Prof.dr. C.W.J. Beenakker

Mission statement

Stochastic resetting is simple enough to be approached analytically, yet modifies stochastic processes in a non-trivial way.

Early time-resolved experiments by Frauenfelder on the ensemble of the kinetic rebinding of CO to myoglobin molecules resulted in a stretched exponential relaxa-tion due to a very large spread of the reaction rates of individual molecules.

This thesis explores how electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy can be used to investigate key biochemical processes.

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics states that a measurement collapses a wavefunction onto an eigenstate of the corresponding measurement operator.

Promotor: Prof.dr. T. Schmidt

The human body consists of hundreds, perhaps thousands of different types of cells, each with different morphologies and functions, despite having the same genome.

The elementary excitations of magnets are called spin waves, and their corresponding quasi-particles are known as magnons. The rapidly growing field of Magnonics aims at using them as information carriers in a new generation of electronic devices, (almost) free of electric currents.

Promotor: K.E. Schalm, Co-promotor: S.S. Lee