This month, the board of NWO Domain Applied and Engineering Sciences has granted several projects within the HTSM programme. AES also granted Take-off proposals from starting entrepreneurs. Three of them go to PIs in our research school.

HTSM
A new method to measure fabrication induced surface spin densities
Main applicant: Prof. dr. ir. T. H. Oosterkamp - Universiteit Leiden

Using the HTSM grant, Oosterkamp hopes to contribute to solving one of the fabrication problems of quantum computers. Developers struggle with the presence of individual, ‘unpaired’ electrons. In most materials, electrons form pairs in which both spin in opposite direction, and therefore annihilate each other’s magnetic field. Unpaired electrons retain their magnetic field, so they can perturb quantum computers. Oosterkamp will now further develop his technique so that in the future scientists can search for the presence of unwanted unpaired electrons during each step of the building process of a quantum computer.

As part of the grant, Oosterkamp’s group collaborates with the company Leiden Spin Imaging. Together they will develop the so-called easyMRFM.

Development of a nanopore-based single-molecule protein sequencer 
Main applicant: Prof. dr. C. Dekker - TU Delft