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Fifteen researchers who have recently received their PhDs can do their research at foreign research institutes thanks to a Rubicon grant from NWO. The Rubicon programme gives young, promising researchers the opportunity to gain international research experience. Among them, physicists Benedetta Flebus and Chris Smiet.

AMOLF researchers have developed nanoscale strings whose motion can be converted to light signals with unprecedented strength. This could allow for extremely precise sensors and comes with an important side-effect. "Analogous to a guitar amplifier in overdrive producing distorted sound waves, our strong motion-to-light conversion leads to distorted light signals", says group leader Ewold Verhagen. "But these signals actually carry information about the motion that may lead to new ways of measuring quantum mechanical motion." The researchers published their results on 7 July 2017 in Nature Communications.

On 10 July 2017, the European Physical Society (EPS) will award the 2017 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize for an outstanding contribution to high energy physics to Erik Heijne, Robert Klanner and Gerhard Lutz. The award ceremony will take place during the 2017 EPS conference for high energy physics (EPS-HEP2017) in Venice, Italy.

The first experimental evidence of a Majorana fermion in Delft 2012 led to a wave of scientific enthusiasm: control such particles are a holy grail in quantum science and technology. Quantum chips based on Majorana fermions promise error-protected quantum computations. However, the fabrication of Majorana-devices is an extremely challenging task.

Water splitting with solar energy could provide an efficient route for large scale renewable energy conversion and storage. Scientists from TU Delft and AMOLF have now engineered a very efficient and stable photoelectrode, a material that absorbs light and directly splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. Furthermore, they use silicon wafers as the light absorbing material, so the system is also cheap. They report on their findings in Nature Communications on Thursday 29 June.

The board of the NWO domain Science has found chairs for seven disciplinary advisory committees. The disciplinary advisory committees form a new advisory structure, which supports the NWO Science board.

While the green nature that surrounds us flourishes, researchers from AMOLF and Wageningen University & Research reveal the secrets of a special protein that conducts this plant growth. Using a smart simulation programme the researchers found out how this protein named katanin operates. They published their findings on 19 June in the journal PNAS.