Visser Lab

Research focus

ERC Consolidator Grant · 2025

EXoplanet SpectrosCopy using 0-nOise Photon Energy resolving Detectors

The question: ‘are we alone in the universe?’, is a central question in astronomy. It has become even more relevant due to the discovery of exoplanets within the habitable zone around their star. The presence of life could be determined from biomarkers in the spectrum of a planet’s atmosphere. However, an Earth-like planet around a Sun-like star is very faint, after suppressing the starlight. A crucial technology is therefore a noiseless, photon-counting detector, which resolves the energy of each photon. For NASA’s new flagship mission Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), detectors have been identified as a large technology-gap with high impact, a gap that should be closed before 2030.…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.