Curriculum

During your Master’s in Applied Physics (AP), you will collect a total of 120 EC within two years. In addition to the compulsory courses of the Master’s in Applied Physics, you will follow additional courses within the specialisation in Photonics. Your second year consists of an internship and your final master’s assignment.

Choose your direction

Within this specialisation, you can go into four different directions: Biomedical Optics, Integrated Optics, Light and Matter Interaction or Quantum Optics. So, next to one compulsory course related to this specialisation, you will follow elective courses within one of these four directions.

European Credit Transfer System

Student workload at Dutch universities is expressed in EC, also named ECTS (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System), widely used throughout the European Union. In the Netherlands, each credit represents 28 hours of work. The recognition of credits is at the discretion of your Master's.

Structure

	Number of EC
Compulsory courses Mandatory for all AP students	20 EC	Quantum Mechanics 2 Mathematical and Numerical Physics Heat and Mass Transfer Small Signals and Detection Ethical and Cultural Awareness
Specialisation courses For the specialisation in Photonics, you will follow one mandatory course and three elective specialisation courses related to one of the four directions within this specialisation.	20 EC	Mandatory specialisation course Fundamentals of Photonics Biomedical Optics Laser Physics and Nonlinear Optics Molecular Structure and Spectroscopy Biomedical Optics Integrated Optics Laser Physics and Nonlinear Optics Integrated Optics Integrated Photonic Systems and Experiments Light and Matter Interaction Light and Matter NanoPlasmonics Quantum and Classical Emitters Quantum Optics Quantum Optics Integrated Optics Quantum Information
Elective courses	20 EC	You can fill up your elective space with courses that match your interests and ambitions. You can choose any master’s course offered at UT, both from the Master’s in Applied Physics and other master’s.
Internship	20 EC	In the first quartile of your second year, you will do an internship.
Master’s thesis	40 EC	You will finish your Master’s in AP with your master’s thesis (30 EC).
Total EC	120 EC

or plan an online meet-up with a student and gain first-hand experience!

Internship

During your Master’s in Applied Physics, you will gain practical experience by doing an internship for approximately three months. Within the specialisation in Photonics there are many options open to you when it comes to choosing your internship.

Examples of internships students previously took on:

Improving the performance of a fibre-based gyroscope by a smarter detection algorithm at Ned-Aero, a manufacturer of components for aircraft and helicopters
Designing meta-surfaces for radiative cooling of radar units at high-tech manufacturer Thales
Improving dispersion compensation for high harmonic generation at Lund University

Master's thesis

You will complete your Master’s by writing your master’s thesis. The choice of your graduation subject is largely up to you and you will write your thesis under the supervision of a professor of one of the research groups. You might, for example, work on photonic quantum cryptography to improve credit card security or build optical fibre-based sensors for salt detection in groundwater aquifers. Or what about using your knowledge of optical sciences to detect multiple sclerosis (MS) at an early stage?

Your master’s thesis could involve investigating questions such as:

Can we make an on-chip optical gyroscope, that is used in electronic devices like a smartphone or smartwatch, that is smaller and more accurate than the current state of the art?
Can we use the way in which water molecules vibrate to image swelling of axons in Multiple sclerosis using CARS microscopy?
What is the fastest way to calibrate a 64-channel optical quantum processor?

Research