Master Project Openings

Many industries and technological developments benefit by designing new materials to optimized performances and save energy. For instance, cosmetic or food industries significantly benefit from materials that have engineered mechanical properties. Designing material in the lab is however expensive and require many steps. Here we aim to use computational fluid dynamics to explore emergent behaviour … Read more

We are witnessing a truly remarkable moment: the birth of an artificial intelligence. Large language models, machine learning and deep fakes are all running on distributed computing networks that use a tremendous amount of energy. For example, the training of chat-GPT used up approximately 1 GWh of energy. The projections are that at the current … Read more

In 2015, a team in Strasbourg made an amazing (and controversial) claim: The electrical conductivity of a material can be dramatically enhanced by embedding it in a tailored photonic environment. Remarkably, light was not involved.  The enhancement was due to the coupling of electron-hole pairs to the vacuum field, i.e., to nothing.  The team recently … Read more

Supervisors: Thomas Bauer and Jorik van de Groep Monolayer 2D semiconductors exhibit uniquely strong light-matter interactions in the visible spectral range due to quantum mechanical exciton resonances. When patterned on the nanoscale, light can be confined into these atomically thin layers of material and pick up a scattering phase and amplitude that is dictated by … Read more

Supervisors: Tom Hoekstra, Peter Schall, and Jorik van de Groep Since the isolation of graphene in 2004, more than two thousand layered 2D materials have been identified. These materials can be exfoliated from bulk down to atomically thin monolayers, which exhibit unique optical and electronic properties, including stable excitons at room temperature. By employing a … Read more

Supervisors: Jasmin Fisher, Ina Flaucher and Peter Schall  The solar spectrum contains many frequencies of light, yet photosynthetic organisms only absorb some of them. To match the spectra, we develop highly efficient light-converting nanomaterials and integrate them into foils to “shape” sunlight into an optimum spectrum for the photosynthetic species at hand. The light tuning … Read more

Nanomaterials have optical properties that strongly depend on their geometry and are therefore are often used as tunable signal transducers in optical sensors. For example, palladium nanoparticles are capable of detecting H2 gas by absorbing hydrogen within its metallic lattice, leading to a modified electronic structure and optical appearance. Recently, we have shown that periodic … Read more