About our research
Research institute
We believe in knowledge transfer between chemists and physicists. That’s why at our campus, all material research is combined in one institute: the Institute for Molecules and Materials (IMM). During your Master’s, you’ll experience this interplay in the lectures and internships. Once graduated, you’ll be able to understand the vernacular of both disciplines and in that way bridge the gap between chemistry and physics.
Research groups
During your Master's, you will perform at least one internship at one of our research groups. Examples of groups can be found below, or have a look at the overview of relevant groups for Master's interships and the full list of departments of IMM.
This research centre focuses on the development and application of nuclear magnetic resonance methods (NMR) that enable the study of local structure and dynamics in functional materials, for example biomacromolecules and their physical interactions.
The Condensed Matter Physics group uses the radiation of free electron laser FELIX to study both static and dynamic properties of matter. The goal of their research is to understand and control the relationship between the properties and structure of nanoscopic and molecular materials.
This group tries to explain and predict properties of molecules, clusters and molecular solids in a computational approach using quantum mechanical, (semi)classical and statistical mechanical methods.
The Molecular Structure and Dynamics group combines and integrates mass spectrometry with IR spectroscopy, enabling them to obtain infrared spectral fingerprints for mass-selected ions inside the mass spectrometer. They apply infrared ion spectroscopy in various analytical challenges of identifying molecular structures of low-abundance compounds within complex mixtures, e.g. in biomarker discovery.
Or have a look at all IMM groups and internships related to Physical Chemistry:
Research projects
Curious what our researchers are working on? Have a look at our current projects.
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Copper-Catechol Synergy for the Development of an Energy-Dense and Long-Lived Redox Flow Battery
The project aims to develop a new generation of copper redox flow battery that have a long lifetime (>20 years) and higher energy density than the state-of-the-art copper redox flow batteries.
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PANACEA
The PANACEA project is a public-private and interdisciplinary collaboration with academic and industrial organisations aiming to provide access to instrumentation and experiments in solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to European chemists.
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Controlling molecular collisions: unveiling the secrets of cold molecules
In this project we study scattering resonances in chemical reactions involving molecules like OH, NO, NH3 and H2CO. Using external fields, we manipulate molecular collisions in order to require deeper insights in the secrets of cold molecular systems
Research facilities
Radboud University hosts a large number of advanced spectroscopic facilities.
You’ll get the chance to work with scientific equipment that is unique in Europe and sometimes even cannot be found anywhere else in the world. As a Master’s student in Physical Chemistry, you’ll get an overview of all these different methods, and you’ll be able to apply your knowledge as a member of a laboratory. Some of our students choose to focus on the development of new scientific methods.