On 28 November, Jeroen Bosch will be presented the Shell Graduation Prize for Physics worth € 5,000 at the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW) in Haarlem.
He won the prize for research into increasing light transmission through opaque material. His findings could improve our understanding of how light is transported through materials such as the skin, for example.
Light diffusion is a phenomenon that occurs when light waves are shone onto an uneven surface or an object with an uneven structure. This makes it impossible to see through your skin or the clouds, for example. And yet materials of all densities do have open channels. Jeroen Bosch managed to find these open channels. His findings may make it possible to transport more light through ‘opaque’ materials.
For their research, Jeroen and his fellow-researchers sent light through opaque materials in a random manner. They used the data they collected about light diffusion to send the light back along the same path in a slightly different way. By sending the light back and forth several times, they discovered which shape the light must have to pass through the material.
This showed that the front edge of the light wave (the wave front) determines the degree to which the light can penetrate the material. The shape varies according to the colour of the light. ‘The principle works for all wavelengths, but only a single shape of wave front will work for each wavelength’, explains Bosch. ‘If you fix the shape of the wave front before changing the wavelength, less light will penetrate the material. This knowledge of the wavelength dependency of open channels provides a measurement for the required ‘path length’ of these channels.’
The jury praised the high quality of Jeroen’s graduation work, both in terms of the experiment and the theory. They also considered his results unique. Jeroen Bosch has now started a PhD project to continue his graduation research. He is working alongside Professor Allard Mosk, who started a new research group at Utrecht University for the project.
The jury was provided by the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW) in Haarlem, a society responsible for judging countless important scientific competitions.
