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.

Mathijs Garming, Pieter Kruit, and Jacob Hoogenboom (imaging physics) have published a paper in collaboration with Maarten Bolhuis and Sonia Conesa-Boj (quantum nanoscience) on a new technique for doing ultrafast scanning electron microscopy (USEM).

Xukang Wei, H. Paul Urbach, and Wim M. J. Coene published a paper in the Physical Review A. They investigated the performance of ptychography with noisy data by analyzing the Cramér-Rao lower bound.

Freek Pols is co-author of a paper on teaching a physics lab course in times of COVID by Forrest Bradbury (AUC), Freek is involved in this Comenius project as an expert on physics lab courses and has contributed in designing this Pandemic resilient lab course.

Sina will be working on the technological development and industrial adaptation of multi-beam microscopes under the supervision of Jacob Hoogenboom and Pieter Kruit.

On the first of October the Applied Physics Makerspace was officially opened. Since the curriculum revision of the BSc Applied Physics, with a focus on design education, having such a space, has been a wish of the programme.

Ernest van der Wee joined our group as a postdoc on October 1st. He will be working on cryogenic super-resolution fluorescence targeting for FIB milling in electron cryotomography, under supervision of Jacob Hoogenboom and in collaboration with the group of Arjen Jakobi.

Rolf Hut, Eric Verschuur and Freek Pols published a paper on how the freshman course Design Engineering for Physics Students was adapted. Teaching a hands- and minds-on course, in which feedback is essential in order to learn, is difficult, especially in times of COVID-19 where student progression cannot be monitored directly.

On September 18th, 2020 Willem van Valenberg successfully defended his PhD thesis on "Methods for Multi-Parametric Quantitative MRI".