Sarkar received her master’s degree in Sustainable Energy Technology cum laude thanks to this final research project at the Plasma & Materials Processing Group of the department of Applied Physics at TU/e.

Shell awarded Jan de Weerdt of the University of Twente the prize for the best bachelor degree project. He researched the growth of algae. The judging committee consisted of Peter de Wit, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell in The Netherlands, Jo van Ham, member of the executive board of TU/e, Karel Luyben, rector of the Delft University of Technology and Ed Brinksma, rector of the University of Twente.

With its yearly Sustainability Awards Shell wants to encourage young students to aim their research at technological solutions for sustainability issues.

The image on the cover of Physical Review Letters shows magnetic manganese ions in a crystal of gallium arsenide (GaAs) – a material used in applications such as LEDs, lasers solar cells and components for optical communication. The picture was made with a scanning tunneling microscope, which the researchers used to image the surface of the semiconductor right down to the level of individual atoms.

The manganese atoms are visible – in yellow and red – in the GaAs crystal. These manganese atoms or impurities absorb one electron from the GaAs, through which they create a positive charge distribution around themselves. The shape of this charge distribution depends on the depth of the manganese atom in the material, Koenraad and his colleagues show. In addition, they explain the shape of the charge distribution around impurities in other materials.
 
The research is important in understanding magnetic impurities in semiconductors. These magnetic atoms (such as manganese) are deliberately introduced in the hope that they can be used in magnetic memories, for example. In 2004 Koenraad’s Photonics and Semiconductor Nanophysics group was the first to understand that the charge distribution around manganese ions in GaAs is not spherical. This had always been assumed up to then. The article provides an explanation for this, and shows the relationship with the depth of the ions under the surface.

The increasing miniaturization of computer chips means an increasing proportion of the introduced impurities, which are largely responsible for the properties of the material, are influenced by the proximity of the surface. That makes a good understanding of these surface effects essential, according to Koenraad. “Not only do researchers in our field see this as important, but the article also shows that you have to take these effects into account in ever-smaller devices.”

Strengths
“We regard it as recognition of what we’ve being doing for the past 25 years in Eindhoven, and also as a good sign for the future”, says dr.ir. Lex Lemmens, Education Director of the Sustainable Energy Technology Master’s program. “Twenty years ago we already combined a number of TU/e disciplinary strengths relating to the theme of energy. Now that Elsevier has developed a tool for rating of research in specific fields, but carried out within different disciplines, we are gaining recognition for the approach that we chose to follow right from the start. Our strength is primarily that we haven’t treated the theme of alternative energy in isolation, but have allowed it to develop in different departments. And we’ve decided to follow the same approach in the newly established Eindhoven Energy Institute."

Bridge builders
For each individual institute the Elsevier report adds up the number of publications in the field of alternative energy into sub-fields in which researchers from those institutes act as bridge builders between different scientific topics. This relates to leading publications with multiple citations. With 69 publications in this list, TU/e takes 16th place. Particular importance was placed on the number of leading TU/e papers in the field of solar cells (44).

Netherlands
At the top of the list is the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, in a top 10 dominated by institutes in the USA. Among the other universities of technology are Caltech (9th place) and MIT (23rd place). Between places 50 and 200 are three other universities in the Netherlands (Delft, VU University Amsterdam and Utrecht), but in Elsevier’s view the differences are not big enough to give exact positions.

Environment
‘Alternative energy’ means all forms of energy that replace the use of fossil fuels. Oil, coal and gas will run out in the longer term, and their large-scale use causes environmental problems. That means research into alternative energy sources is one of the most important scientific challenges of our time.

They developed a reading test, to predict a person’s reading speed in both 2D and 3D. The test also predicts if someone is likely to encounter visual problems watching 3D images.

Lambooij’s research shows that even people with good eye coordination can experience difficulties watching 3D images. It is particularly the combination of extreme depth and motion that is hard for them.

Comfortable way
The researchers want everyone to be able to view 3D images in a comfortable way. That’s why they hope the reading test will become incorporated into future displays. The test can be translated into a ‘viewing comfort’ setting of the display, where the amount of depth can be adjusted, so that it will become less likely people will suffer from complaints as a consequence of watching 3D content.

Lambooij and Fortuin are doing their research in the 3D lab of the Human Technology Interaction research group at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). They are supervised by Dr. Wijnand IJsselsteijn (TU/e) and Prof. Ingrid Heynderickx (TU Delft). Other research topics of the lab are minimal invasive surgery, 3D teleconferencing and 3D TV without 3D glasses. Marten Fortuin works at the department of Optometry at the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. He is doing his PhD research at the City University in London.

Prof. Meijer, who worked for DSM before joining TU/e, thinks that his work of the last twenty years at the university has won him the prize. “The research we conduct is always aimed at what’s important for companies. Our work has to be relevant. Therefore this feels not only as an award for me, but for the whole research group.”

Prof. Meijer will receive the award, and 50,000 Euros, on July 12, at the IUPAC Macro 2010 Congress in Glasgow, UK. He does not yet know what he is going to spend the money on.

DSM, a Dutch producer of pharmaceuticals, healthcare and nutrition products, grants the DSM Performance Materials Award every two years.

Mr. Donné is heavily involved in the international world of nuclear fusion. He is chairman of the Diagnostics Topical Group of EDFA, the European organization for the development of fusion. Until recently he was chairman of the study group for the diagnostics of the international research reactor ITER.

High Potential
Eindhoven University of Technology is quickly expanding its activities in the field of nuclear fusion. Only weeks ago the university allocated a million Euros of additional funding to fusion research. Added to that the university has proposed to move the highly regarded FOM Institute for Plasma Physics from Rijnhuizen to the TU/e campus in Eindhoven.

Master Course in Nuclear Fusion
As of September students can enroll in a specialized nuclear fusion track which is part of the existing master course for applied physics. In September of 2011 the actual new master course in nuclear fusion will start.

The nuclear fusion research group at TU/e is also the coordinator of Fusenet, a European network for education in nuclear fusion, in which 36 institutes from 18 countries are involved. Fusenet is supported by the European Union with 2 million Euros.

• Human Technology Interaction
• Embedded Systems
• Sustainable Energy Technology
• Industrial Design

In the overall ranking the TU/e is only behind Wageningen University and Research Center and the privately owned Nyenrode Business Universiteit.

The ‘Keuzegids Masters’ is an independent publication of the ‘Hoger Onderwijs Persbureau’, the Dutch press agency on higher education. Their yearly surveys of courses are based on the scores of both students and experts. Last December a similar survey of all Dutch bachelor courses also showed that TU/e is the best Dutch university of technology.

ECTP has over 120 members, among which are large companies, universities, research centers and professional associations. The platform, that was started in 2004, aims to develop both a vision and a strategic agenda for the research and development activities of the European construction sector.

ECTP puts the emphasis on, among other topics, healthy buildings, cultural heritage, underground construction, environmental issues in the construction sector, reliability, the integration of construction processes and contributions to a sustainable society.

Mr. Maas will use his term as chairman of the ECTP to address the relatively new topics of ‘virtual construction’ and the consequences of an ageing population for the European construction sector.

“If all works out, this project is going to be historical,” says professor Meint Smit of TU/e and COBRA (the Dutch national research institute Communication Technology Basic Research and Applications). “In the field of optical chips we are ahead of the United States and Asia. With this project we can expand this lead. The prices of optical chips will go down by a factor 10 or more, and at the same time the complexity and performance can go up considerably.”

EuroPIC is an acronym for European Manufacturing Platform for Photonic Integrated Circuits. “Optical chip” is the popular term for a photonic integrated circuit (PIC), the optical counterpart of the electronic integrated circuit.

The main goal of the EuroPIC project is to significantly reduce the costs of both the development and production of new optical chips. The partners in the project all strive for a similar standardization as in microelectronics, where mass production is usually done at foundries. These companies, comparable to contractors, produce different kinds of chips for clients.

For optical chips there is not yet such flexibility. “When you take a new design for a PIC to a foundry, that company will develop a production process tailor made for you. This is expensive and time-consuming,” says Smit. EuroPIC will try to standardize design tools and production techniques. This will enable smaller companies to develop advanced PICs in a low-cost way.
 
PICs are chips that work with light signals instead of electricity, just like optical fibers. The switches between different optical fibers are often still electronic, which hampers the speed of data transmission. Optical switches can remove these bottlenecks. The EuroPIC project is also working on optical sensors, and PICs for medical systems, telecommunication and metrology.

Besides COBRA and TU/e, sixteen other European partners are involved in EuroPIC. Among them are Oclaro (Europe’s biggest producer of optical chips), MiPlaza (part of Philips Research), the University of Cambridge and the Fraunhofer Institute. The list of all partners is available on EuroPIC’s website.

The project’s total budget is a little under 6 million Euros, of which 3.75 million comes from the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Union.

At TU/e, many research groups participate in the ‘Communication Technology Basic Research and Applications’ research institute (COBRA). The research of the institute is aimed at communication technologies, with a focus on optical technologies.

With the NWO grant, Sommerdijk (department of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry) will now focus on the formation of bone. He explains, “So far we have been working with calcium carbonate, the material shells are made of. We will focus now on calcium phosphate, the material bones are made of. We hope to be able to understand and mimic the process of bone formation and growth by replacing the biological molecules with polymers.”

One of the goals of the project is to be able to make bone replacement materials. But Sommerdijk is already looking beyond that. “By understanding the processes of nature, we may be able to come up with totally new materials that no one has previously thought of.”

For his research, Sommerdijk uses a unique electron microscope, of which there is only one in the world; the TU/e cryoTitan, manufactured by FEI Company. This machine can make 3D images on the nano scale of processes in fluids, by freezing the samples extremely quickly.

Production on an atomic scale
Nanotechnology is widely regarded as one of the most promising future technologies. But little nano research is aimed at preparing this technology for real production. Erwin Kessels, associate professor in the department of Applied Physics of TU/e, will use his Vici grant to close the gap between lab research and the industrial production of, for instance, solar cells and new nano-electronics.

An example of such a gap is carbon nanotubes, says Kessels. “Research has shown that they are suited for all kinds of electronic applications. But producing nanotubes with the exact right properties is a process that we cannot control well enough yet. Usually a large number of nanotubes are made, from which the suitable one is selected.” While that may be enough for research purposes, it is certainly not enough for industrial production. Kessels says, “We still need a lot of research before we will be able to take a demo version to an industrial and reliable production process.”

Kessels’ work is about the growing of ultra thin layers, just a couple of atoms in thickness. The state of the art in the microelectronics industry is that layers are deposited that completely cover a surface, from which tiny patterns are then etched. Kessels hopes to omit that step, and to deposit nanostructures without etching at all. A first case may be a transistor made of a carbon nanotube, to which the electrodes are attached directly. At the same time, the 36-year old researcher wants to control the material properties on an atomic scale, for maximum performance of the products made this way. For instance, products like solar panels with a higher efficiency.

NWO Vici grants are aimed at researchers who received their PhDs a maximum of fifteen years ago. The Vicis enable grantees to start their own research groups. In 2009 the TU/e also had two of thirty Vici grants. In 2008, three Eindhoven researchers were granted Vicis.