Erik Bakkers

In Eindhoven, Erik founded his own research group in 2017. The group continues to research nanowires, and has made significant progress in three key areas. The first area, nanomaterials, involves collaboration with Delft in the search for Majorana particles. The recent discovery of Majorana fermions in nanowires opens up a completely new field of research and applications including their possible use as carrier of quantum information for quantum computing. The second area is light emission from silicon. By changing the crystalline properties of silicon, it can be made to emit light, which could, for example, revolutionize fibre-optic data transmission. The third area is the application of nanowires in solar cells, in which significant efficiency gains have been achieved. Presently, the group is researching development of flexible very high efficiency solar cells in which solar energy is harvested in III/V semiconductor nanowires as well as development of flexible nanowire solar cells by embedding nanowires into a transparent and flexible PDMS polymer.

A fascinating aspect of my work is manipulating quantum properties of materials at nano-scale, opening up new worlds, and testing and developing theories put forward a century ago.”