Vincenzo Lamberti graduated

Congratulations to Vincenzo, who graduated today and obtained his PhD degree! Vincenzo worked on the use of plasmon-enhanced fluorescence for single-molecule biosensing. Amongst others, he demonstrated the single-molecule sensing of nucleic acids directly in serum, both in a mono- and multiplexed assay. You can read his thesis here: link. We will continue with this work […]

Teacher’s day

Today we received a group of high-school teachers that were eager to learn about the value of photonics for biosensing. Koen and Selina gave presentations, followed by a labtour. It was a great day and a perfect audience to talk about our work and its value for society!

NWO Vici grant awarded

We are incredible happy that Peter was awarded an NWO Vici grant worth 1.5 MEur! The project “DynaSense” aims to develop novel metasurfaces with thermal management for single-molecule studies. This is the third grant for Peter in the Veni, Vidi, Vici scheme, thank you NWO! You can read more about our plans here, we can’t […]

Yuyang Wang and Peter Zijlstra promoted

Yuyang Wang, the ICMS Microscopy Facility manager, was promoted to project manager. Congratulations to Yuyang! Read about the ICMS Microscopy Facility here, and let us know if you are interested in collaborating! Nearly at the same time, Peter was promoted to full professor of Molecular Plasmonics at TU/e. The group will of course continue to […]

Grant awarded for metasurface sensors

The Molecular Plasmonics group has been awarded an €800,000 grant in the NWO (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek)-ENW Open Competition M2 call for the exciting “MetaSense” project. This innovative project, a collaboration with Prof. Jaime Gómez Rivas from the Photonics and Semicondudctor Nanophysics (PSN) group, proposes a novel metasurface sensor for molecular detection. The MetaSense […]

MP group joins the ICMS Advanced Microscopy Facility

Our group relies on various advanced optical and tip-mediated microscopy techniques to visualize the interaction of light and matter on the nanoscale. Our group’s efforts are greatly enhanced through by joining ICMS’s advanced microscopy facility, a hub of advanced microscopy tools dedicated to interdisciplinary research. The facility, led by Dr. Yuyang Wang, is equipped with […]

Single DNA-molecules interacting fast!

Congratulations to Sjoerd Nooteboom for achieving a difficult goal: he probed the binding kinetics of single DNA molecules on microsecond timescales using single gold particles as nanoantenna. He engineered the size and shape of the nanoantenna, as well as its surface chemistry, to achieve a record-high fluorescence intensity. You can find more details here: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.nanolett.4c03220.

Book on super-resolution microscopy

Peter, together with Lorenzo Albertazzi, wrote a book about the use of single-molecule and super-resolution microscopy for materials science. The book is geared toward physical chemistry backgrounds. It contains five chapters with the fundamentals of different super-resolution techniques, followed by seven chapters from contributing editors that describe applications in materials science. Check it out here!

Paper in Nature

Together with Yuyang Wang at the ICMS microscopy facility we have developed a microscopy approach to visualize and track local organization in dynamic polymeric materials. The approach uses a polarization-sensitive fluorescence microscope that allows for the real-time visualization of local molecular alignment with diffraction-limited resolution. In a project lead by Bert Meijer and Hailin Fu […]