项目介绍

2026年10月23日

Are you excited to solve technical challenges with a real-world application?
Are you eager to build something truly unique in the world?

Development of a pulsed electron source with extreme transverse bunch brightness, based on photo-ionization of laser-cooled atoms, for time-resolved protein crystallography.

Context: ERC-funded project “Cool T-ReX”

Goal: Develop a unique and innovative instrument to enable time-resolved protein crystallography with electrons (and be the first in the world in doing so).

Scientific relevance: Understanding how proteins function is crucial to improving medicine and unraveling processes that are fundamental to life. Time-resolved protein crystallography uniquely allows following the conformational change of a protein with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution, yielding a “molecular movie” of how the protein performs its function. This is currently only possible on large-scale X-ray facilities. In this project we will build the very first instrument that can make such movies through time-resolved protein crystallography with electrons rather than X-rays, on a laboratory-scale setup. Next, through collaboration with leading research groups in time-resolved protein crystallography, we will demonstrate the instrument’s capabilities in time-resolved crystallography experiments on photo-active proteins with medical relevance (and used in the field of optogenetics, awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine!).

Your role: Drive the development of this unique instrument. You will build on our research group’s two decades of experience in building electron sources based on the photo-ionization of laser-cooled atoms. This technique has demonstrated electron pulses with record-low transverse temperatures, corresponding to a high transverse coherence, as needed for protein crystallography. In this project we will push this transverse coherence even further, making use of some of the unique capabilities of this source technology. The result will be an electron beam with a “transverse bunch brightness” that is three orders of magnitude beyond the current state of the art. To reach this ambitious goal, you will work with a team of experienced technicians, a second PhD student, a PostDoc, and the PI (Julius Huijts). We are part of the larger Coherence and Quantum Technology group in the Department of Applied Physics.