Lotte Mertens wins Lorentz Graduation Award

Lotte Mertens - Lotte Mertens (UvA-IoP) will receive the Lorentz Graduation Award for Theoretical Physics, awarded annually by the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities. In her prize-winning master's thesis, Mertens studied the relation between quantum mechanics at the microscopic level and the measurements we make of it at much larger scales. The Lorentz Graduation Award for Theoretical Physics is one of the Young Talent Awards that the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities annually awards for students in science and technology. Mertens performed her research in the Condensed Matter Theory group under the supervision of Jasper van Wezel. From fiction to science. The subject of quantum mechanics is often viewed as a rather mysterious one - which is perhaps why science fiction writers like to use the topic in their stories so much. One of the main reasons for the mystery surrounding the theory is that quantum mechanics describes the smallest particles that we know of, very far removed from the world of our everyday experience.