One of the challenges in optical imaging is imaging the inside of tissue in high resolution. Traditional methods allow us to look to a depth of approximately one millimetre. Researchers at Delft University of Technology have now developed a new method that can penetrate up to four times as deep: up to around four millimetres. The healthcare sector in particular may benefit from the new technique in the future.

Delmic is launching an automated ultra-fast system, FAST-EM, which uses 64 electron beams. Reliable and extremely fast, FAST-EM is aimed at imaging biological samples without the need to constantly babysit the machine.

Malavika Manju Sudheer will be working on the project SYNOPTICS. This project aims to use all the properties of light; Amplitude, Phase, Polarisation and Wavelength to achieve ultimate performance in imaging and sensing device applications. Her supervisor is Silvania Pereira.

Next year, a helium balloon the size of a soccer stadium will bring a NASA telescope to the edge of space. This project is called GUSTO, and it will help scientists understand galactic evolution by probing interstellar gas. Its most important payload are three detectors developed by Jian Rong Gao and his teams at TU Delft and SRON, without which the telescope would be blind as to its mission purpose.

We know that the brain sends a muscle a message before it moves. But we are not entirely sure what happens next. Rick Waasdorp has come up with a swift, non-invasive technique for looking at exactly this. It is perfect for further research into muscular dystrophy.

Seeing tiny particles even better through a microscope – student Teun Huijben managed it for his Master’s thesis. As well as a top mark, the breakthrough has also earned him the title Best Graduate of the Faculty of Applied Sciences.

In 2018, Johannes Vermeer’s world-famous Girl with a Pearl Earring underwent a total ‘body scan’: using state-of-the-art techniques, the painting was studied in painstaking detail from top to bottom. It provided a wealth of new insights about the painting and the painter. Four TU Delft faculties worked on the project.

The local newspaper the Delftse Post interviewed Ron Haaksman, lecturer physics practical work/experiments about his work during covid times.

This highlighted article from OSA journals addresses the important problem of "killer" particle detection and classification on wafers in semiconductor manufacturing. This is a challenging problem because the particles are generally sub-micrometer in size, and detection must be performed at high speed. The authors use a convolutional neural network to classify the particles to five classes: 80 nm, 60 nm, 50 nm, 40 nm and background.

Romano Groeneveld will be working on his master thesis under supervision of Prof. Dr. Paul Urbach and in cooperation with eye surgeon N. Reus. He will conduct research in the field of optics in the human eye. More specifically, they are aiming to trace undesired side-effects in multi-focal intra-ocular lenses (multi-focal IOL’s) and try to solve these issues.