Hans Bartling obtained his BSc degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Twente. After a year at Imperial College he started his MSc Applied Physics in Delft. He has done a small rotation with Sander Otte and his thesis with Tim Taminiau on nuclear spin clusters surrounding NV centers. For his final rotation he will go to ETH Zürich. For the next four years, Hans will join the groups of Tim Taminiau and Ronald Hanson at Delft/QuTech, where he will work on nuclear spin clusters in diamond and work towards quantum error detection on small quantum networks, both experimentally and theoretically.
Tjerk Benschop will join the group of Milan Allan in Leiden. Tjerk can’t wait to start his research there: “The aim of my research will be to investigate superconductivity in magic angle twisted bilayer graphene using scanning tunneling microscopy. In doing so, we plan to further establish this system as a new, carbon-based unconventional superconductor. Furthermore, we hope to be able to draw analogies regarding superconductivity in this material, and other famous unconventional superconductors like the cuprates or iron-based superconductors, in order to gain a better understanding of this phenomenon, and its relation with strong correlations.”
Joris Carmiggelt received both his Master and Bachelor physics degree at Leiden University. During his Bachelor, he studied half a year at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich as an Erasmus exchange student. Afterwards, Joris took various Master courses in theoretical particle physics at ETH Zurich, which he put into practice during a summer research project at CERN. Finally Joris decided that he was most fascinated by condensed matter physics. As part of a collaboration between the Van der Sar lab in Delft and the Yacoby lab in Harvard, Joris did a joint MSc graduation project in this field. He worked in both labs and studied spin waves using NV center magnetometry. This state-of-the-art technique uses lattice defects in diamond as atomic-sized magnetic sensors. Joris is very happy to start working in Delft soon: “I am very much looking forward to starting my Casimir PhD project in the Van der Sar group at Delft/QN. I will use NV center magnetometry to study valley physics and nonlinear optical response in Transition Metal Dichalcogenide (TMD) monolayers. These are two-dimensional semiconductors, which were only recently discovered. A lot of exciting physics is associated with these exotic materials due to the broken inversion symmetry of their crystal lattices. By locally studying TMD monolayers at the nanoscale, we hope to get a more fundamental understanding of their band structure and optical properties.”

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 2017, the following fifteen alumni of the track received a Casimir PhD position: Tim Baart (now researcher at Shell), Julia Cramer (now postdoc in science commmunication 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), Eduardo Pavinato Olimpio (due to personal circumstances, Eduardo did not finish his PhD project), Remko Fermin, Jingkun Guo, and Tobias de Jong. 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.