News

In a paper to be published in Science on 22 September, the Pierre Auger Collaboration reports observational evidence demonstrating that cosmic rays with energies a million times greater than that of the protons accelerated in the Large Hadron Collider come from much further away than from our own Galaxy.

The board of NWO's Domain Science (ENW) has granted funding for five proposals in the NWO Physics Projectruimte, a granting instrument for small-scale projects that propose innovative fundamental physics research that has a scientific, industrial or social urgency.

Julia Cramer is the winner of NWO's Minerva Prize for 2017. Cramer will receive the prize for her research in the field of quantum science and technology. Once every two years, the NWO Domain Science (ENW) awards the Minerva Prize for the best physics publication by a female researcher. The committee was very impressed by the quality of an article that appeared in Nature Communications in 2016, of which Cramer was the lead author. In that article, she and her co-authors showed that it is possible to protect certain quantum states against errors. Cramer will be awarded the prize during the annual Physics@Veldhoven conference in January.

In Nature today an international team of researchers from TU Eindhoven, QuTech, TU Delft and the University of California – Santa Barbara presents an advanced quantum chip that will be able to provide definitive proof of the mysterious Majorana particles. These particles, first demonstrated in 2012, are their own antiparticle at one and the same time. The chip, which comprises ultrathin networks of nanowires in the shape of 'hashtags', has all the qualities to allow Majorana particles to exchange places. This feature is regarded as the smoking gun for proving their existence and is a crucial step towards their use as a building block for future quantum computers. 

To determine how efficient new solar cells convert sunlight into electricity, small sample cells are tested under ideal conditions. However, the reported efficiency is not very representative of the actual annual yield when the cells are placed onto a rooftop and exposed to the Dutch weather. In a recent article in ACS Energy Letters, AMOLF researchers present a model that predicts how the next generation of solar cells will perform under realistic conditions.

University of Groningen scientists led by Spinoza laureate and physics professor Bart van Wees have created a graphene-based device, in which electron spins can be injected and detected with unprecedented efficiency. The result is a hundredfold increase of the spin signal, big enough to be used in real life applications, such as new spin transistors and spin-based logic. The research is part of the European Union’s EUR 1 billion Graphene Flagship, and the results were published in Nature Communications on 15 August 2017.

Researchers from AMOLF, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and the Energy research Centre of the Netherlands (ECN) have developed a technology to create efficient bright green colored solar panels. Arrays of silicon nanoparticles integrated in the front module glass of a silicon heterojunction solar cell scatter a narrow band of the solar spectrum and create a green appearance for a wide range of angles. The remainder of the solar spectrum is efficiently coupled into the solar cell. The current generated by the solar panel is only reduced by 10%. The realization of efficient colorful solar panels is an important step for the integration of solar panels into the built environment and landscape. The new design was published online on August 15, 2017, in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

A thin vapour cloud in front of a liquid metal may be the solution to protecting the reactor walls of future fusion power plants to the extreme heat fluxes encountered. In Nature Communications, PhD candidate Stein van Eden and colleagues at DIFFER and Ghent University presents measurements of a vapour cloud catching and redistributing the energy from the incoming plasma in the reactor. The work indicates that liquid metal walls are a promising concept for future fusion reactors like DEMO.