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In preparation for cell division, cells need to copy (‘replicate’) the DNA that they contain. A team of researchers from TU Delft, collaborating with investigators from the Francis Crick Institute in London, has now shown that the protein building blocks involved in the initial steps of DNA replication are mobile but reduce their speed at specific DNA sequences on the genome. Their findings, which will be published on 26 March in the open-access journal Nature Communications, were facilitated using an integrated approach involving biophysics and biochemistry that will propel new discoveries in the field.

The heart of any computer, its central processing unit, is built using semiconductor technology, which is capable of putting billions of transistors onto a single chip. Now, researchers from the group of Menno Veldhorst at QuTech, a collaboration between TU Delft and TNO, have shown that this technology can be used to build a two-dimensional array of qubits to function as a quantum processor. Their work, a crucial milestone for scalable quantum technology, was published today in Nature.

An international team of scientists that includes ImPhys researcher David Maresca published an article in Neuron today demonstrating decoding of movement intentions in the brain using ultrasound. The work shows great promises for the development of less invasive brain-machine interfaces.

The Faculty of Applied Sciences has attracted four talented international researchers through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowships programme of the European Union. The new Fellows are: Anders Barth (Bionanoscience), Baptiste Heiles (Imaging Physics), Josep Ingla-Aynés (Quantum Nanoscience) and José Palomo Jiménez (Chemical Engineering).

The authors of the 2018 article Quantized Majorana conductance have retracted this article. The authors were alerted to problems by two scientists in the same research area and then went on to re-examine their earlier measurements. In doing so, they found that the main conclusion had not been adequately substantiated.

Onderzoekers van de TU Delft hebben een test ontwikkeld waarmee ze specifieke stukjes genetisch materiaal kunnen opsporen, waarna de uitslag met het blote oog af te lezen is. Met de test kunnen onder meer virussen, zoals het coronavirus, en antibioticaresistente bacteriën snel en goedkoop worden gedetecteerd. De resultaten zijn gepubliceerd in Biophysical Journal.

Hydrogen is playing an increasingly important role in the transition to a completely sustainable economy. Right now it is already being used on a large scale in industry, but it is also being used more often for sustainable energy storage and as a fuel for large and heavy vehicles in particular. There are plans for converting the existing natural gas network into a hydrogen network. However, under certain circumstances hydrogen is a combustible and sometimes even an explosive gas, so it is important to track down the tiniest hydrogen leaks as quickly as possible. This makes cheap, reliable and small sensors that can quickly detect small amounts of hydrogen of vital importance. Researchers at TU Delft have now developed a material that is extremely suited to this task.

One of the dreams of physicists today is being able to harvest electricity back from dissipated heat. The key to this probably resides in circuits that contain single molecules. Instead of being limited to classical conductance, the thermopower can be enhanced dramatically by the properties of quantum states. But then, what quantum states offer good efficiency? What characteristics are desirable? Theory often offers contrasting predictions. Unfortunately, experiments have also not yet provided any proof, since they are notoriously difficult to set up. But now, researchers at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in collaboration with UC Louvain, University of Oxford, Northwestern University and Heriot-Watt University have done just that. They experimentally probed the gate and bias dependent thermoelectric properties of a single molecule for the very first time. The results have been published in Nature Nanotechnology.

Het College van Bestuur van de TU Delft heeft besloten Simon Gröblacher (afdeling Quantum Nanoscience) te benoemen tot hoogleraar Quantumfysica.

Can a light breeze nullify the 1.5-metre measure indoors? It looks like it could, says Saša Kenjereš (Chemical Engineering) in a new article in Annals of Biomedical Engineering. He modeled the way virus particles leave a talking person's mouth, as well as how far particles can travel in both quiescent and moving air. In doing so, he found that a virus can surf along on a slight tailwind and thus travel much farther than in an environment in which the air is completely still. In a room with stationary air, 1.5 metres seems to be a safe distance. But a barely perceptible breeze allows virus particles to bridge such a gap with relative ease.