Swarms of drones, pedestrians or the cells in your body. Those are all examples of active matter: materials whose building blocks can move autonomously. That’s what Luca Giomi studies. Giomi has been appointed Professor of theoretical physics in the area of soft matter and biological physics at the…

Salt crystals, a nano-sized golf stick and molten glass. The LION Image Award competition of 2023 yielded a lot of beautiful images once again. But in the end, only one can be the winner.

Daniela Kraft's group has succeeded in creating a network of microparticles that is both strong and completely flexible. This may sound simple, yet they are the first in the world to succeed in doing so. A real breakthrough in soft matter physics.

Martin van Hecke and Lennard Kwakernaak (Leiden university and AMOLF) develop a mechanical metamterial that can count to ten in their research.

PhD candidate Jiangnan Ding explores how you can design a thick slab of rubber in a way that it might act as a mechanical computer bit. This so-called mechanical metamaterial is pushed in a specific way to change its shape. ‘With a very simple material, we might be able to do simple calculations in…

Leiden physicists Alexandre Morin and Samadarshi Maity study self-organisation and flocking phenomena. They shed light on flocking, which helps to understand how it is possible that birds in a flock don't collide. With plastic microbeads, they create an experimental setup and they developed a mathematical…

Luca Giomi has the first results of his ERC consolidator grant. He discovered that epithelial cells move collectively but in different ways, depending on the scale you look at. It is hexatic at small scales, and becomes nematic at larger scales: it is a multiscale order. This collective movement of…

What are the costs involved in studying abroad and how can you finance your stay? Avoid unexpected expenses by researching financial matters thoroughly in advance.

What are the costs involved in studying abroad and how can you finance your stay? Avoid unexpected expenses by researching financial matters thoroughly in advance.

What are the costs involved in studying abroad and how can you finance your stay? Avoid unexpected expenses by researching financial matters thoroughly in advance.

Course, Summer School

As a student you will need to take a number of costs into consideration. But how can you manage your money and are you entitled to any financial support?

When deciding what to study you undoubtedly read a lot of information about your study programme. Leiden University employs various systems to provide information about programmes and courses and to facilitate communication between lecturers and students.

What are the costs involved in studying abroad and how can you finance your stay? Avoid unexpected expenses by researching financial matters thoroughly in advance.

What are the costs involved in studying abroad and how can you finance your stay? Avoid unexpected expenses by researching financial matters thoroughly in advance.

He makes music, goes to the athletics track twice a week and, according to his supervisor, has done his research so well that it would not be out of place in a PhD research. Physics and astronomy student Hidde Stoffels' undergraduate research on the properties of dark matter is of such high quality…

...What does seem clear, though, is that there is a great deal of room for improvement in the process of out-of-home placement. The FSW's social and behavioural scientists give their views.

After many years of preparations, CERN has approved a groundbreaking new experiment: the Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP). Physicist Alexey Boyarsky was involved from the start. ‘We know there is physics that’s missing and we aim to find it.’

Not only dark matter, but also ordinary matter and dark energy are tracked in the largest ever cosmological computer simulation ever. In the FLAMINGO simulations, you can see virtual galaxies and clusters of galaxies emerging over the course of billions of years. This is no easy task: with more than…

Human cells are protecting their proteins from unfolding and aggregating. That's what biophysicist Alireza Mashaghi and his team discovered after seven years of in-depth research into the folding mechanisms of proteins. With an unprecedented approach, the team was able to study the folding of a single…

How do people vote? How rational are voting choices? How much do external factor weigh in? In this article social scientis provide some background.

Brothers and sisters within a family, with the same parents, experience their upbringing differently. As well as the impact of their own negative experiences, the way siblings experience their upbringing also plays an important role in anxiety and depression. This is the conclusion reached by Marie-Louise…

Social

Henk Hoekstra and Alessandra Silvestri work on the astronomy and theoretical physics in the Euclid mission. These Dutch researchers are part of the mission.

The virtual Exhibition Gold Matters is now live and can be explored online. This exhibition is the result of collaborations between artists, members of mining communities, and researchers of the Gold Matters’ project. Curating the exhibition is a collaborative effort of the Gold Matters Team with Sabine…

Social

Our students come from all over the world and have many different interests, but they share one ambition: change the world and show ‪#‎whyhumanitiesmatter‬.