Over the last decades, the progress made in the generation of laser pulses shorter than a picosecond (10^-12 s) has allowed us to reach extreme optical power intensities exceeding 10^15 W cm^-2. This tremendous power has triggered an abundance of original ...
Microscopic visualisation of optically transparent samples has been a topic of interest for several decades. Features such as density or chemical composition can influence the optical phase of transmitted light, and phase contrast can reveal these structur ...
The topic of this thesis is the development of new algorithmic reconstruction methods for quantitative phase imaging (QPI). In the past decade, advanced QPI has emerged as a valuable tool to study label-free biological samples and uncover their 3D structur ...
Visualization of organelles and their interactions with other features in the native cell remains a challenge in modern biology. We have introduced cryo-scanning transmission electron tomography (CSTET), which can ac-cess 3D volumes on the scale of 1 micro ...
In this thesis, we study the 3 challenges described above. First, we study different reconstruction techniques and assess the fidelity of each reconstruction results by means of structured illumination and phase conjugation. By reconstructing the 3D refrac ...
Low-energy electron holography (LEEH) is one of the few techniques capable of imaging large and complex three-dimensional molecules, such as proteins, on the single molecule level at subnanometer resolution. During the imaging process, the structural infor ...
The magnetic force microscope (MFM) is an established experimental tool for imaging stray fields with high spatial resolution and sensitivity. The MFM contrast can however contain contributions from the sample topography, variations in the surface Kelvin p ...
Perpendicular shape anisotropy (PSA) and double magnetic tunnel junctions (DMTJs) offer practical solutions to downscale spin-transfer-torque Magnetic Random-Access Memory (STT-MRAM) beyond 20 nm technology nodes, while retaining their thermal stability an ...
This manuscript reports on the application of copper thermal spraying in the manufacturing process of an electrical connection between Nb3Sn cables for superconducting magnets of fusion reactors. The joint is realized through diffusion bonding of the spray ...
Chemical reactions and phase transformations in nanometer-size objects may happen at very short timescales, so conventional characterization tools are not applicable. A new technique combining high spatial and temporal resolution is ultrafast (or dynamic) ...
