March 2024: two new contributions got accepted for publication

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

Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions (MSCA) ONLINE info day: 5th Feb. 2024

TJY Derrien will be delighted to participate into the “Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowships as a tool for bilateral cooperation”, a webinar that will be held on Feb. 5th 2024 – 10h-12h (link to be precised).

The current envisioned program is meant to represent a number of diplomatic landscapes for funding scientific research between France, Czech Republic and Slovakia. It will cover the following parts.

  • Marie Curie Post-doctoral Fellowships (MSCA/PF),
  • ERA Fellowships / ERA talents,
  • Program Hubert Curien (PHC) “Barrande” for PhD scholarships between France and Czech Republic,
  • a summary of Czech, Slovak and French landscapes for funding researchers,
  • an applicant guideline on how to find a host,
  • a testimony of experience by Thibault JY Derrien (Marie Curie Individual Fellowship 2015 – 2017, and RISE fellow 2019 – 2024).

2-months visit (Marie Curie RISE) of 2 PhD students from University of Cuyo (Mendoza, Argentina)

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.

From left to right: Marika Kurova, Andrés Bertoni (University de Cuyo, Argentina), Diego, Micaela J. Sosa (University de Cuyo, Argentina), Dr. Thibault JY Derrien (Hilase Centre, Czech Acad. Sci.)

Funding extended

The SLA department that hosts our research group has obtained a joint project OPJAK (Ministry of Research) in collaboration with several groups of the Institute of Physics (AS CR).

Our group is therefore prolonged by 1 year up to 2 FTE, counting 1 FTE for Dr. TJY Derrien, 0.5 FTE for Krystof Hlinomaz and 0.5 FTE for Kristyna Gazdova, effective from January 1st.

Krystof is planned to spend 0.5 FTE at TopTec (Turnov) and Kristyna has equivalent PhD contract in Brno.

We contributed to the 7th IT4I users meeting

TJY Derrien, head of the computational group of Ultrafast Photonics at HiLASE, attended the 7th IT4I supercomputer users meeting. The annual workshop is excellent to meet with colleagues from best computational groups of the country from IOCB, FZU, CEITEC Brno, CATRIN Olomouc, Institute of Plasma Physics, ELI beamlines, IT4I, and more.

There, TJYD delivered an oral presentation titled „Benchmark of time-dependent density functional theory simulations on a variety of European CPU-based supercomputers“. In this communication, he presented a summary of the predictions obtained using quantum numerical simulations (time-dependent density functional theory, TDDFT) along with an overview of high performance computation analyses gathered since 2016 on a variety of Top500.org CPU-based super-computers.

He also attended the meeting with the Users Council as secretary and chaired the 2 sessions of presentations of Tuesday.

The IT4I center has been the main working tool of our computational group since 2019 and has been strategic for contributing to high impact factor studies with our collaborators.

7th IT4I Users meeting attendees in the super-computing room
Credits: IT4I

National conferences matter: Laser63 in Třešt’.

On Oct. 18th-20th 2023, TJY Derrien, head of the group of Ultrafast Photonics, has participated and gave an oral presentation at the Laser63 conference, a Czech conference organized by the Czech Academy of Sciences, that gathers Czech scientists and laser industrial ecosystem from the Czech Republic.

Beyond the language barrier, it was very appreciable to meet new collaborators and very important for enabling further sustainability to deliver a summary on our capacity to prepare predictive numerical simulations for fs and ps laser interaction with materials.

Credits: HiLASE Centre

The press releases prepared by HiLASE are here: website | LinkedIn.

The website of the Czech conference Laser63 is here (in Czech).

Our TDDFT predictions are supporting tabletop attosecond spectroscopy experiments of the Charles University

Today, a new joint paper with the team of Martin Kozak of the Charles University was submitted for publication. The paper draft is available here and demonstrates an extraordinary agreement obtained between the harmonics generated from a silicon target irradiated with temporally-overlapping ultrashort laser pulses with the predictions prepared using the time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT).

The paper suggests that the TDDFT simulation technique is sufficiently mature for making high-precision predictions for ultrashort laser processing and beyond.

Invited stay at the Instituto de Optica, CSIC, Madrid

Invited stay at the CSIC Madrid

TJY Derrien, leader of the Ultrafast Photonics group, was invited in the frame of CSIC-ILINK project for a duration of two weeks at the Instituto de Optica, CSIC, Madrid, Spain.

During this stay of 2 weeks in company of Prof. Javier Solis, Prof. Jan Siegel, Dr. Jörn Bonse, and Dr. Mario Garcia-Lechuga (project host), fruitful and exciting collaboration was initiated in view of preparation of a future joint funding.

During his visit, TJY Derrien gave seminar at the Instituto de Optica on Thu 5th of October, along with Prof. Jörn Bonse. Abstracts are available here.

LIPSS workshop

During the stay, the LIPSS workshop was also organized by Prof. Esther Rebollar and co-organizers.

We warmly thank our hosts for this wonderful hosting time and look forward to the next steps together!

We were granted 15 M. core-hours with the 29th IT4I-OPEN call

Today, the group of Ultrafast Photonics was granted with 15 millions core-hours for the preparation of quantum simulations based on the method of time-dependent density functional theory.

This computational time will be essentially meant to run the Octopus code (TDDFT) in collaboration with Prof. François Courvoisier (FemtoST, Besançon, France) and Dr. Peter Juergens (Max Born Institute, Berlin, Germany).

Another collaboration with CSIC Madrid has also started around TDDFT and will also be part of this project.

Visitors of the Marie Curie RISE “ATLANTIC” networking action are also entitled to get computational during their visit.

While great science lies ahead, we also hope to fetch funding for improving our people’s conditions very soon.

“Talent 2023” Czech competition high-school student Filip Neubauer stayed in our group two weeks

Czech Republic is organizing lots of opportunities for young talents. The Talent competition is one of them.

During two weeks, Filip Neubauer (from the high school of Stepanska, Praha) joined the group and had possibility to work on some of our datasets using machine learning.

It was great to interact with one of the new talents of this country and hope to see Filip coming back to us very soon!