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.

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.

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.

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.

Ron Haaksman, lecturer physics practical work & experiments has been interviewed by the local newspaper the "Delftse Post" 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.

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.