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Sometimes, the inside of a material can determine what happens on the outside. A team of physicists from the University of Amsterdam has devised a new way to make use of this general truth, in particular in systems that do not conserve energy. The results were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.

Dark matter might be disappearing and sending its signal - but not very fast - in dwarf satellite galaxies Dark matter is even more elusive than thought before. This is the main message of a new study by a group of scientists that includes Shin'ichiro Ando of the Institute of Physics at the University of Amsterdam.

Gels occur everywhere in our everyday life, but the precise way in which they form is not very well understood. Combining experimental observations and numerical models, physicists from the universities of Amsterdam and Cambridge and from Unilever have now shown that gel formation is closely related to another well-known physical process: percolation.

A team of physicists from the universities of Stanford and Amsterdam, led by UvA-physicist Jorik van de Groep, have constructed a new type of lens, with a thickness of only a single layer of atoms, that can be turned on and off at will. Such tuneable optical elements have promising applications, for example in augmented and virtual reality.

In a paper that appeared in the journal Physical Review Letters this week, astrophysicists from the University of Amsterdam propose a new way of potentially detecting dark matter. Astrophysicists Thomas Edwards, Marco Chianese and Bradley Kavanagh, from the groups of Samaya Nissanke and Christoph Weniger at the GRAPPA center of excellence, have studied the gravitational waves produced by the merger of a neutron star and a black hole.

When salty water evaporates, the salt can crystallize and creep over a long distance. This effect, which can cause serious problems in for example outdoor electronics, was investigated in detail by a team of UvA-researchers led by Noushine Shahidzadeh. Their results were published in Science Advances in December.