From January 1st 2025, the department of Scientific Laser Application (lead by Prof. Nadezhda M. Bulgakova), and hence the group of “Ultrafast Photonics” (led by T. J.-Y. Derrien) will officially move to FZU Slovanka (Prague, Metro Ladvi), within the Division of Optics (led by Dr. Alexander Dejneka).

• The theory group “Ultrafast Photonics” will start with the move from Nov. 1st 2024. This means that access to our production machines may be disrupted for some weeks. The shorter the better.
• The femtosecond lasers and other parts of the laboratory will be moving next year, around April-May 2025.
• Email addresses will come back to the fzu.cz domain in the course of 2025.

Overall, the stay of SLA department at HiLASE has generated several of the best cited publications for the HiLASE Centre. With moving to the Division of Optics, our indicators will be more aligned with those required by the Academy of Sciences.

TJY Derrien presented the results of computational research on the role of realistic experimental conditions on optoelectronic properties of graphene. This research was developed in the frames of OPJAK/”Sendiso” project and MSCA/RISE/”Atlantic”. Results were presented as poster presentation in two conferences:

• Conference on Laser Ablation, Creete. [Program]
• Grapene Week, Prague. [Website | Program is only available using the dedicated application].

The simulation technique at the center of this work enables to treat organic systems in a way that couples electron structure theory and molecular dynamics, at reduced computational cost.

Next presentation in conferences & laboratories envisioned for the moments are:

• Nov. 4th-5th, 2024: 8th IT4I users meeting [Program]
• Nov. 20th, 2024: Max Planck for Structure and Dynamics of matter, Hamburg (Germany).
• Dec. 2024: Faculty of Appl. Mathematics, Technical University of Ostrava (Czech Republic).
• Feb. 2025: Invited presentation at FemtoMAT conference, Mauterndorf (Austria).

The consortium of EU project “EuroCC” organizes “Quantum Computing seminars” on a regular basis.

On September 26th, T. J.-Y. Derrien was honored to present a 1h seminar on “Coherent control of electron dynamics in solids: a milestone for quantum computing?”

The seminar will be made available on Youtube and presented the knowledge gained from Ultrafast Photonics activities over the last 10 years at FZU Institute of Physics.

A proposition of activities for the new research group “Quantum Dynamics of Systems” was also depicted.

The HPC project “FLORENTINA” has been granted 70,000 core-hours on the Karolina supercomputer. This will enable to continue with production of predictions using time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) for solid materials. Several key papers for applications of ultrashort laser pulses are in the pipe! Stay tuned.

The Czech Republic will soon host a superconducting quantum machine, that will enable novel possibilities in various domains of computational sciences and technologies. The machine will be hosted at the Czech national super-computing facility IT4Innovation (VSB Technical University of Ostrava).

In this occasion, the Laboratory of Quantum Computing (LQC) was created (current director is Prof. Marek Lampart) and includes the development of community codes for quantum IT, for science, but also for industry.

There, T. J.-Y. Derrien supervises 2 members from Ostrava among the multidisciplinary quantum laboratory. Within this affiliation, his mission will be to continue publishing in impacted journals with excellent international collaborators, and to attract public and private funds for pursuing the super-computing adventures of the Czech Republic.

LINKS

• Group of the Laboratory of Quantum Computing
• IT4Innovation

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.