Transistors used in computer chips have now reached the tiny scale of mere nanometres, yet chips manufacturers still lack the optical power to study this new generation of chips. Researchers from TU Delft have built a lensless microscope to make an image at the scale of 200 nanometres. With further refining of this technique the researchers expect to bring images of nanoscale transistors within their grasp in the next two years.

At Thursday 26 and Friday 27 November the first Annual Meeting of the Dutch Inverse Problems Community was held at the Conference hotel “De Werelt”, magically situated in the forest around Lunteren (a village between Utrecht and Arnhem). Scientist from various research groups at Dutch universities that are working on inverse problems were gathering, where TU Delft was represented by people from the geoscience, applied physics and applied mathematics departments.

Bart de Koning will join ImPhys per December 1st, 2021. He is a MSc student in Applied Mathematics and Bart will be doing his master thesis under supervision of Aurèle Adam. He will be designing freeform optics for multiple source illumination with AI.

Martijn Nagtegaal, PhD student @ImPhys participated in the "Hoezo? Show!". The Hoe?Zo! Show is an interactive science game show in which young scientists answer questions from curious children live on stage in a race against time. Will the scientists be able to answer children's questions quickly enough? Or do the children's questions prove too difficult for these clever minds?

The Delft Health Initiative (DHI) brings researchers together who are involved in health research and innovation, in order to focus TU Delft expertise and to contribute to pioneering health technologies within relevant (inter)national research programs. DHI has rewarded Qian Tao with a grant of € 20.000 euro for her submission: 'Not Created Equal: Visualizing Gender Differences in Population-based Screening Trial on Cardiovascular Disease (ROBINSCA)'. Her project has been judged best in the category CardioTech.

On 25 & 26 November 2021 the first annual meeting of the Dutch inverse problems community will be held. Jeroen Kalkman is one of the invited speakers and he will talk about imaging challenges in optical tomography. Eric Verschuur and Koen van Dongen are members of the organizing committee.

Ali Mohammadi-Gheidari and Jacob Hoogenboom received a HTSM top-sector funding of € 534.000 for their project: “MEMS-based optics components for high-resolution electron/ion microscopy”. They will study the electron optics performance of designed and fabricated components both experimentally and via computer simulations, including study of the interaction of energetic electrons with the micron- and nanoscale patterned features that form the functional units in the MEMS-components (Roadmap Nanotechnology).

Last week, the IEEE-UFFC-S Special topic school on Waves and Transducers started. Thirty “students” with a back-ground varying from astrophysics to biomedical ultrasound, from theoreticians to experimentalists, from academia to industry have gathered together to follow this special topic school. ⁠

Pieter will conduct his PhD research as an external student of the ImPhys department at the RNA Therapeutics Institute of the UMass Medical School. He will focus on gathering, processing and analyzing microscopic single-molecule data. The goal is to conduct molecular research that enables the rapid application of new biological discoveries to solutions for unmet challenges in human health.

As part of the final projects of our introductory lab course, students conceived experiments related to the umbrella topic of 'Physics of toys and sports' and carried out the experiments at their homes. This paper revisits two of these experiments described by student teams and illustrates how self-conceived experiments provide opportunities to truly engage students in doing science.