News
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New SPARXS technique reveals DNA behaviour at unprecedented speed23 August 2024Studying how single DNA molecules behave helps us to better understand genetic disorders and design better drugs. Until now however, examining DNA mol...
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Robert Smit receives his PhD with distinction. ‘I am happy to be back in the lab’04 July 2024An all-optical transistor, a molecule-sized sensor and a new kind of single-photon source for quantum communication. All dreamed applications of funda...
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Computing with rubber22 May 2024Without electronics carrying out computational tasks our daily lives would look very different. Devices such as elevators, vending machines, turnstile...
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New professor of Theoretical Physics: ‘The problems I study can come from anywhere in society’26 February 2024The financial sector, supply chains and ecology. Not necessarily topics you might associate with physics, yet it’s exactly what new professor Diego Ga...
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New professor Luca Giomi creates his own physics of living systems19 February 2024Swarms of drones, pedestrians or the cells in your body. Those are all examples of active matter: materials whose building blocks can move autonomousl...
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A first in the lab: a tiny network that is both strong and flexible15 February 2024Daniela Kraft's group has succeeded in creating a network of microparticles that is both strong and completely flexible. This may sound simple, yet th...
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Meet the professor: ‘Can my sister be prosecuted for stealing my eraser?’08 February 2024On the university’s birthday, professors traditionally teach a class of 10 and 11-year-olds during Meet the Professor, and this year was no different....
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Why do birds flock? Shedding light on collective motions in heterogeneous populations26 October 2023Electrifying plastic beads in a laboratory setup creates flocking behaviour similar to that observed in birds. And if you mix beads of two sizes, they...
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Studying ferritin: ‘we hope this will eventually give more insight into Alzheimer's’10 October 2023Exactly how Alzheimer's disease develops is not well understood, but an imbalance of iron in the brain might just play a role. Martina Huber of the Le...
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From forming embryo to cancer metastasis: the significance of collective cell movement21 September 2023Against all expectations, the most common tissue in our bodies behaves differently at different length scales. That’s what physicist Luca Giomi discov...
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Corrugated plastic unveils a new design principle for programmable materials20 September 2023Corrugated plastic turns out to be exemplary of a new class of ‘multistable’ metamaterials that can reversibly change shape. This insight can lead to ...
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A piece of rubber can't count. Right?03 July 2023A block of rubber that can count to ten and even remember the order in which it is pressed. Physicists Martin van Hecke and Lennard Kwakernaak (Leiden...
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A quirky block of rubber as a calculator30 May 2023PhD candidate Jiangnan Ding explores how you can design a thick slab of rubber in a way that it might act as a mechanical computer bit. This so-called...
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Rubicon grant for Leiden physicist: why do leaves of a tree always grow in the same shape?13 April 2023PhD candidate Ludwig Hoffmann will spend two years at Harvard University in the US thanks to a Rubicon grant he won on April 11. Using theoretical mod...
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The career choices of cells16 December 2022How does an embryonic stem cell decide if it becomes a heart cell or a kidney cell? That’s the question computational biologist Maria Mircea studied f...