€2,7M has been awarded within the HollandPTC consortium to researchers of ErasmusMC, LUMC and TU Delft for joint proton therapy research.

Jacob Hoogenboom has taken over the CPO leadership from Pieter Kruit. Jacob has been with the group now for almost 10 years. During this time he has already caused the group to connect closer to new applications of microscopy and combinations with light microscopy and developments in chemistry and biology. As a group leader he will continue on this path, in collegial cooperation with the other principle investigators in the group.

Two groups of students, will start their minor project in Computational Science and Engineering at Charged Particle Optics. One group (4 students) will be coached by Kerim Arat, and the other group (3 students) will be coached by Luc van Kessel.

Gyllion Loozen and Jacob Caro have published an article in Optics Express on the capabilities of an on-chip dual-waveguide optical trap for stable trapping of extracellular vesicles (EVs). EVs are small, cell-derived particles that strongly attract attention as biomarkers for cancer.

Stef will do his MSc project with Kees Hagen on delivering proof on principle of a multi-beam splitter array and a deflector array in a scanning electron microscope. He will also critically review the design and see if it can be further optimized. And, in cooperation with Thermo Fisher, he is going to see whether such a beam splitter array can also be used for STEM.

NWO has approved an application for the Center for Ultrasound Brain Imaging at Erasmus MC (CUBE), in which TU Delft is also involved. The science financier has earmarked nearly 2.5 million euros for the realization of CUBE.

Bingxin will work on engineering the substrate for particle displacements. Her supervisor is Paul Urbach.

Fran will work with scatteromety for nanoparticle detection. His supervisors are Silvania Pereira and Dmytro Kolenov.

The field of optical microscopy research has developed rapidly in recent years. Thanks to the invention of a technique called super-resolution fluorescence microscopy, it has recently become possible to view even the smaller parts of a living cell. Now, by making a smart refinement to that technique, researchers at TU Delft have pushed its boundaries even further. Where previously objects measuring up to 10-20 nanometres could be observed, their method makes it possible to focus on structures of as tiny as 3 nanometres across.

In this article, a sparsity‐inducing scheme based on widefield stimulated emission depletion, which requires stringent control of the polarization state of both the excitation and depletion laser, is introduced by Bernd Rieger and co‐workers for superresolution fluorescence microscopy. The ideal state involves excitation and depletion lasers with linear polarizations, orthogonally oriented in the sample plane. This state is obtained from linearly polarized light from the laser, which is made elliptically polarized before reflecting off the dichroic mirror.