Kristýna Gazdova won the 1st prize in the Best Student Presentation Award competition (Young Researcher category) at the Venice School on Laser In Materials Science (SLIMS)

MSc. Kristýna Gazdova, PhD student in the group of Ultrafast Photonics (department of Scientific Laser Applications) of the Hilase Centre, was awarded the 1st prize for young researchers in the Best Student Presentation Award competition at the School on Lasers In Materials Sciences (SLIMS), an award dedicated to the memory of Professor Roger Kelly. 

MSc. Kristýna Gazdova presenting her poster at the Venice School of Laser In Materials Sciences (SLIMS).

Kristyna is the 5th member of the SLA department to have received the Roger Kelly award after Dr Thibault JY Derrien (2016), Dr Sergei Lizunov (2016), Dr Chiara Liberatore (2018), and Dr. Martin Zukerstein (2022). 

The SLIMS co-directors Professors Leonid Zhigilei, Maria Dinescu, and Anna Paola Caricato (left) with the winners of the Roger Kelly Award 2024.

The school SLIMS is held every two years in Venice, Italy. The school provides lectures from renowned professors on the multiple physical and chemical aspects triggered by laser interaction with materials and offers an informal ground for fruitful interactions between professors and students from all over the world. Professor Nadezhda Bulgakova was among the lecturers. She gave the lecture titled “Modeling of laser-matter interaction: Linking theory and experiment”.

LINKS

• Awards of the School of Laser In Materials Sciences (SLIMS).
  https://slims-school.org/awards.htm 
• FZU Group of Ultrafast Photonics. https://www.fzu.cz/en/research/divisions-and-departments/division-5/department-63/group-6301 
• FZU department of Scientific Laser Applications
  https://www.fzu.cz/en/research/divisions-and-departments/division-5/department-63

Our provider of backup for simulation data is CESNET. Due to technical issue, they had to decommission our backup server and to transfer it to the newer S3 system.

However, this system is no longer compatible with SSH/RSYNC. Transition to AWS S3 is being made from today. This slows down TDDFT data collection to our servers, but does not prevent it.

More info

• Documentation of Amazon Web Service S3 protocol provided by CESNET
• Details over the change by CESNET

We have several months of delay in the delivery of scientific results for our collaborators (Charles University, Max Börn Institute, BAM, CSIC, …). Origin of these delays are provided below.

Our national supercomputers IT4I have performed a 1-month maintenance of the Karolina machine.

HiLASE IT department has changed numerous things (policy, people, mailboxes, certificates, proxy, …), leading to interruption of our production chain for now several months.

We are reporting on the 6-years Marie Curie project “ATLANTIC”, as executive coordinator.

We hope these elements that are out of our control will not damage our collaborations.

Situation should come back to normal in few days, still with an incompressible delay.

Since Atlassian decided to give up on free academic licenses, we have moved our infrastructure to GitHub. Find us on https://www.github.com/tjyderrien/.

Consequently, I have disabled a number of accesses on Bitbucket. Just write me and ask your access.

Started in March 2019, the project Marie Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) networking project “ATLANTIC” has ended in Feb. 2024. We submitted the periodic report yesterday.

What is “ATLANTIC”?

ATLANTIC stands for “Advanced theoretical network for modeling light matter interactIon”
Website is http://www.atlantic-rise.eu/

Overall, this project has connected 14 institutions of theoreticians in light-matter interaction together.

What are the outcomes?

Most of the outcomes of the project are:

• several professors and students could spend months in Prague and visit us from various countries (Argentina, Uzbekistan, Japan, Belarus & Russia – until Feb. 2022);
• we also spent months in these countries;
• knowledge and cultural exchanges were taking place through a number of scientific stays, conferences and workshops.
• as a result, 19 scientific publications are carrying acknowledgment to this project, including outstanding theoretical works on electron-photon-phonon coupling, dissipation in light-matter interaction, and some other ones making extensive usage of high power computation (time-dependent density functional theory).
• our group also produced 8 deliverables on plasmonics, light-electron excitation of solids, effect of intense on light materials mixtures, calculation of optical response of solids, new kinds of two-temperature models, and a more commercial overview of our modeling activities.
• An important outcome is also a strong training on geopolitical & economical aspects of international projects. The project was implemented went through COVID, breakout of war in Ukrain, and experienced the 200% yearly inflation of Argentina.

What is next?

The final report will be available publicly on CORDIS platform in next weeks, and outfalls of this project will appear here and there in the next months.

We are delighted to have hosted this project of 6 years. We are also happy to have finished it, as it is a pretty heavy load in term of administration. As a whole, our group within HiLASE Centre played the role of executive coordinator, an activity which took 20% on our creative scientific time. This well demonstrated our responsibility and our capacity to coordinate a complex international public funding from the Horizon programs, along with enriching our portfolio of simulation techniques thanks to the fruitful interactions enabled by the project.

Our management decided to make numerous changes in the IT infrastructure.

• Transfer of everything to Microsoft Office 365, decreasing modularity for our group. Workaround methods have been found.
• Transfer of @fzu.cz mailboxes to @hilase.cz.
• Change of proxy.

This unfortunately slowed down the production of our group that is based 100% on the HiLASE IT infrastructure.

We hope our collaborators will excuse us for this delay induced by decisions that are out of our control.

On Wed. 10th April, 10am, T. J.-Y. Derrien will present an invited seminar at the Max Planck institute for Structure and Dynamics of matter (MPSD), in the Theory Department of Prof. Angel Rubio.

Announced title of the seminar is “Time-dependent density functional theory for femtosecond laser engineering of solids”.

In 2016, TJY Derrien spent 6 months in the Theory Department of Prof. A. Rubio as guest scientist of Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (Individual Fellowship). In 2018, he spent 1 year at MPSD as a post-doctoral scientist. There he was introduced to Quantum Electrodynamics and applied for ERC funding, with help from Dr. Micheal Ruggenthaler who is now permanent group leader at the MPSD.

There, he also met with numerous other excellent scientists among whom several joined the group of Prof. Prineha Narang located in Harvard (USA) at that time. In 2024, Prof. Narang (now permanent at UCLA) visited the Czech Republic as “Quantum ambassador” via the Embassy of United States in the Czech Republic.

This month, TJY Derrien contributed to two publications to appear online within few days:

• P. Suthar, F. Trojanek, P. Maly, T. J.-Y. Derrien and M. Kozak, Momentum-dependent intraband high harmonic generation in a photo-doped indirect semiconductor, Communications Physics (2024).
• M. Zukerstein, V. P. Zhukov, T. J.-Y. Derrien, O. Fedotova, N. M. Bulgakova, Double-pulse-laser volumetric modification of fused silica: the effect of pulse delay on light propagation and energy deposition, Optics Express 32, 12882 (2024).

2 PhD students from the University of Cuyo (Mendoza, Argentina) Andrés I. Bertoni and Micaela J. Sosa have visited the HiLASE laboratory during 2 months. While hot summer took place in Argentina, Andrés and Micaela have successfully braved the Czech winter.

Their 2-months stay was funded by the Marie Curie project ATLANTIC.

Out of their stay, they managed to enlarge the scope of the group activities to biology and to chemistry using microscopic modeling. They both contributed to the ATLANTIC project deliverables and knowledge exchange, a mission that Marie Curie Actions stand for.

The cultural exchange has also been excellent, sharing empanadas (!), music events, discussions in Spanish, and even in Czech. As a result, Czech-Argentinian relations have never been so well developed.

Their stay is definitely what Marie Curie Actions can offer at its best. We look forward to seeing them again with greatest pleasure.