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After a severe crack in exchange rate between EUR and CZK, national call on the research budget of Czech Republic had been canceled after organizing and concluding on the competition, expertise of institutions, and selections of research teams. As a result, a number of position had been canceled, including mine. However, my post-doc in Germany was already finishing.

The proof of the scandal is available in Czech language, here.

Separately, I had met with Dr. Heiko Appel in Berlin, whom advised me to write a Marie Curie individual fellowship to apply in his laboratory.

The ATLANTIC project of the European Commission stands for developing an “Advanced theoretical network for modeling light matter interaction”.

Since March 1st 2019, the ATLANTIC project, which aims at developing an international network and regular exchanges between theoreticians of laser materials interaction all around the world, has started. The international consortium is composed of 11 countries including 6 members of the EU (Bulgaria, Ireland, Czech Republic, France, United Kingdoms and Germany) along with 5 non-EU countries (Japan, Russia, Bielorussia, Argentina and Uzbekistan) for a total of 13 participants. The Bulgarian group is coordinator of the project.

Purpose of the project is to exchange researchers (permanents, post-docs and PhD students) between teams that have been pioneering various methods of numerical modeling for the description of interaction of laser light with materials. The project is funded by the European Commission, under the Horizon 2020 Marie Curie Actions, “Research and Innovation Staff Exchange” program, and comprises prestigious theoretical groups such as the groups of:

• Prof. Eric Suraud (CNRS Toulouse),
• Prof. J. Kohanoff (Queen’s University of Belfast),
• Prof. Tchavdar Todorov (Queen’s University of Belfast),
• Prof. Kazuhiro Yabana (Tsukuba University),
• Prof. Cristian Sanchez (Mendoza, Argentina),
• Prof. Nadezhda M. Bulgakova (HiLASE Centre, Institute of Physics, Prague, Czech Republic),
• Prof. Andrew Horsfield (Imperial College London, UK),
• Prof. Anton Husakou (Max Born Institute, Berlin),
• Prof. Mikhail Fedoruk (Novosibirsk State University),
• Prof. Olga Fedotova (Minsk, Bielorussia),
• Prof. Guillaume Duchateau (CNRS Bordeaux, France),
• and Prof. Tzveta Apostolova (New Bulgarian University, Bulgaria), coordinator of the project.

The project looks forward to ensuring highest standards in term of scientific quality, ethics and diplomacy in view of training future generations of scientists with the best human and scientific standards.

The consortium will meet at the New Bulgarian University (Sofia, Bulgaria) this week, for the project kickoff meeting.

A new website will be opened for the ATLANTIC project soon.

Today, I submitted my application for ERC starting grant! Of course, I won’t disclose the topic for now, but it is exciting to have applied !

If granted, I would get 2 PhD students and 2 post docs over 5 years. Finger crossed!

Going back to writing the pending publications.

Application for permanent position

In early January 2018, I applied for a CNRS Junior Researcher position (Section 04/03: atoms, molecules, plasmonics) and reached the last stage of selection: oral presentations. Over 88 submitted applications, 33 people were interviewed. Only 10 people were kept in the priority list, where only 1 person got permanent position at CNRS.

Accepted MSCA RISE project proposal

In early 2018, I participed in drafting a RISE Marie Curie proposal named ATLANTIC. It has been selected for funding on June 18th. We are preparing the Grant Agreement phase. The project counts 13 partners in the world and an average budget of 950,000 € including 100,000 € for Hilase Centre for training young scientists in advanced theoretical modeling for laser-matter interaction. More details will be given when Grant Agreement will be signed.

Submitted a Czech proposal

In April 2018, we submitted jointly with Prof. Gurevich (RUB, Germany) and Dr. Yoann Levy (HiLASE Centre, Czech Republic) a joint DFG/GAČR proposal where both Prof. Gurevich and Dr. Derrien are principal investigators.

Accepted conference proceeding

In June 2018, a joint conference proceeding on the excitation of surface plasmon polaritons in lossy materials was accepted for publication in Journal of Physics: IOP conference series (IOP).

Accepted publication with Jena University

In July 2018, we submitted a joint research publication with Dr. Stephan Gräf from Jena University. This publication was promised in the MSCA QuantumLaP final report.
It is now accepted for publication in Materials, Impact factor 2.7.

Preparation of several publications

Several publications promised in the final report are under preparation. Stay tuned!

Future plans

Preparation of ERC starting grant is on the way.

The public summary of the project has been published on the EU server CORDIS.
The link is also available in the menu bar of the website, in the section “Publications”.

After having reported these results in international conferences (AES 2017 South Korea, COLA 2017 France, Ultrafast Optics 2017 Moscow), having been published in Czech public media (Novinky.cz, Technical Weekly CZ, Ceske Televize 24), it was time to report this success story at the HiLASE Centre (FZU Prague). The seminar duration was 45 minutes and the time was shared between T.J.-Y. Derrien, Y. Levy and I. Mirza.

Seminar abstract is available on the HiLASE website: PDF.

In line with the WP 3 of the Marie Curie project QuantumLaP, T. J.-Y. Derrien is joining the group of Prof. Angel Rubio from March 1st 2018 to develop further the quantum theory of laser-matter interaction. He will be spending 70% of his time in the Theory Group of Max Planck Institute for Structure and Dynamics of Matter (Hamburg) and supporting the HiLASE (Prague) activities by 30% of the time.

Dr T. J.-Y. Derrrien has been invited by Bochum University (Germany) to provide 30 hours of lectures on the topic of Plasmonics, as a block-lecture course for the Erasmus Mundus Master program named “Laser Technologies and Photonics.” A written exam is planned in early March and about 10 people are expected.

14th November 2017 Technical Weekly, Prague.

This Tuesday 14th of November 2017, several articles were published in the media of Czech Republic on our research findings.

1. An interview of Prof. N. M. Bulgakova and Dr. T. Derrien has been published in Technical Weekly on the 14th of November 2017. This public review aims to inform citizens of Czech Republic on the latest public news about research and technology. It is mostly read by people from research and industry. A snapshot of the printed article is provided. The website only provides the first sentences of the article.
2. The same interview has also generated a second full length article (in Czech) available on the website of Czech Television (Ceska Televize), the most important public funded channel in the Czech Republic. The Google Translation though reveals some inaccuracies, which could emerge from the automatic translation. As we didn’t get the chance to authorize the final version of the article, a list of inaccuracies is provided below.
3. The news was also republished by Novinky.cz, 7th-8th most visited website in the Czech Republic (according to Alexa).
4. Finally HiLASE also republished the article in Czech (link to the article) on the laboratory web page.

List of mistakes identified in the article of Czech Television.

• The original discovery of the large area processing at such level of regularity was demonstrated by the group of Jan Siegel and Javier Solis in CSIC Madrid, Spain (Optics Letters 2014). The limit of this study was found in the treated material: only Chromium could exhibit regular structures in the regime of removing matter with laser (named “ablation regime”).
• The novelty of our study lies in the theoretical model, which predicts the possibility to obtain high regularity on a large amount of metals as the experimentally observed regularity was successfully correlated with the distance on which some surface electromagnetic waves travel at the surface of the laser-irradiated metal.
• The contribution from our italian colleagues is found in the realization of the series of experiments performed on 6 metals, which support the theoretical analysis and theoretical predictions.
• The head of HiLASE is Dr. Tomas Mocek (see the page of staff on HiLASE website). Note that this mistake was introduced by Google Translate, and not by the authors.

We are happy to announce that our Marie Curie (H2020, EU) project “QuantumLaP” has now reached its maturity. The final report of the Marie Curie funding has been submitted on the 31st of October, after 2 years of great support from Marie Skolodowska Curie Actions for a total of 147,000 € over 2 years.

Since the 1st of September, main researcher of this project belongs to the
BIATRI project of Prof. Bulgakova (HiLASE Centre, Institute of Physics, Czech Republic) in the position of:

Senior Researcher in the group of Laser nanostructuring at HiLASE, Prague, Czech Republic

He is also

Visiting post-doc scientist in the group of Prof. Angel Rubio
Max Planck Institute for Structure and Dynamics of Matter, Hamburg, Germany

and

Visiting researcher giving lectures at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum,
Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology
in Plasmonics
Bochum, Germany