We aim to simulate discontinuous shear thickening in hard sphere suspensions in order to further elucidate the basic physical mechanisms behind this phenomenon and to develop quantitative predictions that apply to a wide range of suspensions.

The Metamaterials 2025 conference brings together circa 350 international and dutch experts in the field of metamaterials. Metamaterials are nanostructured and microstructured materials with special optical, mechanical and acoustic properties that derive from their engineered internal structure, and that cannot be found in natural materials. They are building blocks of photonics, information processing materials, robotics, and for instance adaptive photovoltaics.

The project Local Big Histories aims to develop a student project that will be used in big history courses and will connect big history to local histories. Big history courses provide students with an overview of how Earth, life and human societies in general became the way they are today. This means they provide students with a type of history that all people in the world share and that can foster the development of a global identity. It is not always clear to students, however, how such a global history and identity are connected to local histories and identities, that for many people also remain important. In this project, we aim to connect these types of histories and identities by stimulating students to reflect on how their own local histories and identities have all been shaped in unique ways by shared global processes and as a result can be linked to a shared global identity. We will do so by asking students from different parts of the world, including students at different universities, to collaborate on their own local big histories. We will also ask them to jointly present their results on a public layered world map that will hopefully encourage others to adopt a similar approach.

We still don’t know everything about the particles and forces that define our universe. Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider could provide answers and reveal new physical principles, particles and forces. Researchers will now develop an innovative analysis to investigate if there are yet-undiscovered new particles hidden deep in the data.

Disorder put to good use Quantum effects are fascinating but can only be observed at extremely low temperatures. One approach to push the quantum world to higher temperatures is to use a newly discovered class of crystalline materials: magnetic topological insulators (MTIs). In this project, the search is on for new MTIs with exactly the right properties to be used for next-generation spintronics applications, energy-saving and quantum technologies. Where traditionally disorder is the enemy of crystalline materials, we will exploit intermixing disorder, swapping magnetically active atoms around in the crystalline lattice to create robust designer magnets that accomodate quantum effects.