Advent calendar - December 5th - Herman Duim

In the Zernike Institute Advent Calendar, we are presenting 24 short spotlights in December. In these specials, we highlight PhD students, postdocs, and technicians of our research groups - providing a glimpse into their typical day at work. In Episode 5 meet Herman Duim.

I currently work as a PhD candidate in the Photophysics and Opto-electronics group at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials. A typical day in the labs starts off for me by slowly ramping up the laser to full power, which gives me plenty of time to have my morning coffee whilst going through my mail and new publications. After that, it is time to go and get some lab work done. After a few days of measurements, I typically have a substantial amount of data to go through, so that often my week is divided in lab days and data analysis days.

In our group, we study novel solution-processable semiconductor materials, such as quantum dots, carbon nanotube and metal halide perovskites, that are promising for opto-electronic applications. Personally, I am most interested in the metal halide perovskites. Their colorful emission and chemical versatility make these materials very exciting to work with. I focus primarily on the relation between the material’s microstructure and its optical properties to learn what we could do to further improve the material quality. One of the things I really enjoy about our group is that many of my colleagues are fabricating solar cells or LEDs, so that there is a stimulating cross-talk between spectroscopy and actual applications of the material in devices.