After finishing their Casimir Pre PhD track, Remko Fermin, Jingkun Guo, and Tobias de Jong will start a PhD project that they have composed themselves, the so called Casimir PhD positions. Last week, all three have successfully defended their proposal before a jury of three PIs from our research school. We are very happy to add these talented young researchers to our research school soon, the Casimir Board wishes them all the best with their projects. 

Remko will join the group of Jan Aarts in Leiden where he plans to do three different experiments in correlated electron systems in which one or more symmetries are broken. The jury was impressed by Remko's ambitious proposal and enjoyed discussing it with Remko during the interview. The second candidate that they interviewed, Jingkun, will go to the group of Simon Gröblacher at the Quantum Nanoscience department in Delft. Jingkun's plan is to connect superconducting qubits experimentally to an optomechanical interface, after which various systems can be connected via optical fiber. Due to the low photon loss over fiber, this scheme would allow long-distance entanglement of superconducting qubits. This enables transmitting quantum information from a superconducting qubits to the receiver that is far away. Tobias will join the group of Sense Jan van der Molen in Leiden. In his research, Tobias will focus on manipulating Charge Density Waves (CDWs). By systematically creating junctions with other layered materials in Van der Waals stacks, he will investigate and manipulate new behaviour emerging from interface interactions of CDWs. Complemented with real-time studies on the dynamics and spatial structure of the CDW phase transitions, the aim is that the knowledge gained in this research project will then be used to manipulate CDWs into tunable superstructures.

About the Casimir PhD positions
The Casimir PhD positions are funded through the NWO-Gravitation program ‘NanoFront.’ Casimir PhD positions are awarded to outstanding students of the Casimir Pre-PhD track. Between 2011 and 2016, the following twelve alumni of the track received a Casimir PhD position: Tim Baart (now researcher at Shell), Julia Cramer (now postdoc at Leiden University and communications officer at QuTech), Chris Smiet (now postdoc at Princeton), Jelmer Wagenaar (now manager Academy in Project Controls at ‎Primaned), Misha Klein, Tom van der Reep, Henk Snijders, Marios Kounalakis, Guoji Zheng, Joeri de Bruijckere, Michiel Bakker (Michiel decided to accept a PhD position at MIT instead), and Eduardo Pavinato Olimpio (due to personal circumstances, Eduardo did not finish his PhD project). The Casimir Pre-PhD track focuses on preparing MSc. students for a PhD position, either at Leiden, Delft or elsewhere. You can read more about the Casimir Pre-PhD track here.