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.

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.

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.

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.

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.