Are you a B.Sc. or a M.Sc. student looking for a project in an ambitious, curious, and creative team environment? Do you want to specialize in nanophotonics, quantum optics, or computational optics? Then COPS is the place to be. We are looking for creative students to control interactions between light and matter. Please discuss with us your preferences (we have the best coffee on campus 😉
Click here for projects for B.Sc. and M.Sc. students (physics, chemistry, nano),

Courses
We are responsible for several courses that are a part of the master Applied Physics at the university of Twente, check the list here.

What does COPS do?
Worldwide hundreds of research groups at universities and in companies are busy with locking up light in a small box by means of photonic materials. In 1987 it was theoretically predicted that the radiation of light by an excited atom can be repressed, without loosing the high energy state of the atom in the form of heat.

This prediction was the start of research into these crystals, even expected by researchers to be the building blocks of optical ‘chips’ which manipulate information in the form of light. In the summer of 2004 COPS, including students Karin Overgaag and Arie Irman, was first in the world to decelerate and accelerate the generation of light by an excited atom in a photonic crystal. This experiment was reported on national tv-news. On our website you can find the news item, and lots of information about the control of light with photonic materials.

COPS for students
“Get the most out of yourself!” Do you recognize yourself in this? Or in: “The combination of theory and experiment is very important for me”? If so, COPS is the group for your project. Every project is on something completely new, nothing is routine. Yet we advise you closely to prevent you from “drowning”.

Ad Lagendijk: “We love problems. If we find a new scientific problem, we are most happy”. This is what COPS is about: we want to discover. For instance, Pepijn Pinkse and Ad Lagendijk study “quantum-scattering” of light, leading to a quantum secure credit card.

We know that we ask a lot of you, but we give a lot in return by means of inspired supervision, experience in the world top of science and society, and lots of fun (also outside the lab). Interested? Please e-mail to cops@utwente.nl, or come for coffee in Meander building.

More information about our research can be found on the research page.