On July 10, 2016, Dr. Thibault J.-Y. Derrien and Dr. Yoann Levy travelled to Venice, Italy for the 5th International School “Lasers in Materials Science” on the Isola de San Servolo, home to Venice International University.
The school was directed by Maria Dinescu (National Institute for Laser, Plasma and Radiation Physics, Bucharest, Romania), David B. Geohegan (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA), Antonio Miotello (Trento University, Italy), and Paolo M. Ossi (Politecnico di Milano, Italy). The School provided undergraduate students, PhD students and young research scientists with a wide opportunity to learn on fundamental roots of the interactions of laser light with different materials that are usually missed in traditional programs. The attendees were offered with 18 lectures from world-leading scientists, ranging from fundamentals of laser-matter interaction to scientific and industrial applications in various fields including new material production and bio-medicine.
One of the lectures was given by the RP4 Leader Nadezhda Bulgakova. The school also provided excellent opportunities of interactions and establishing cooperation with other researchers and colleagues working in similar, yet diverging fields.
Yoann presented work on Temperature relaxation after modulated absorption of femtosecond laser pulse in gold and fused silica in the LIPSS formation regime and Thibault presented work on the Role of electron-hole pair dynamics in modification of silicon upon femtosecond laser irradiation.
For his excellent work and presentation, Thibault Derrien was awarded the 2nd place among “Rising Stars” (Third Year PhD and Post-doc researchers) in the schools poster competition in memory of Prof. Roger Kelly.
In the context of QuantumLaP Work Package 4: “Dispersion relations for surface functionalization”, I developed a numerical tool (in Python) to investigate the properties of Surface Plasmon Polaritons with a wide selection of materials and laser wavelengths.