Newly appointed professor Jaime Gómez Rivas at AMOLF's 400th PhD award ceremony

Gómez Rivas studied physics at the University of Madrid and the University of Liege. He gained his doctorate from the Van der Waals-Zeeman Institute of the University of Amsterdam. After a postdoc period at the University of Aachen, he started the AMOLF Surface Photonics Group in April 2005. This group is located at the High-tech campus in Eindhoven. Silke Diedenhofen will gain her doctorate from Eindhoven University of Technology on 20 December 2010. She carried out her work at the Surface Photonics group and her thesis describes how light is propagated in layers of semiconducting nanowires. She discovered that the propagation of light is strongly influenced by the morphology of the nanowires. Layers of thin nanowires form a transparent material with a double effective index, but layers of thick nanowires give rise to a turbid medium in which light is strongly scattered. The results of this thesis can be used to increase the yield of solar cells or to improve the sensitivity of optical sensors.

The first PhD thesis from AMOLF was published in 1951 and was entitled: Een kleine massaspectrometer als lekkenzoeker en h-d analysator [A small mass spectrometer as leak detector and h-d analyser] and was written by M.E. Reinders. The thesis describes research that was carried out at the Laboratory for Mass Spectrography, the predecessor of AMOLF. During AMOLF's 60-year history there has been a continuous output of PhD theses with a peak of 18 theses per year in 2008 and 2009.