Luuk is originally from the Netherlands and obtained his Bsc. in physics from the Radboud University in Nijmegen. Afterwards he moved to Scotland to obtain his MSc. in theoretical physics from the University of Edinburgh. During his master thesis project with Prof. Andrew Huxley he investigated properties of exotic superconductors in high magnetic fields. This motivated him to continue in Condensed Matter Physics and he joined the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies (DIAS) in the fall of 2017 under the supervision of Dr. Graham Kells. Trinity College Dublin acts as the awarding body for his PhD where he is supervised by Prof. Stefano Sanvito with whom he works together on a joint-project involving also Dr. Kells.
Currently his main research interest is the simulation and investigation of dynamics of quantum many body systems. Specifically he is looking at topological superconductors that host special Majorana bound states which have been proposed as candidate materials for topological quantum computation. He looks at how fast these Majoranas can be transported and how information encoded within them decoheres under noise. For this he learned different numerical techniques including Tensor Networks (DMRG), Monte Carlo simulation and Machine Learning (Differential programming and Reinforcement Learning). Some of his other side interests include non-markovian quantum evolution, topology change and dynamical phase transitions.