The end of current funding is approaching and the group of Ultrafast Photonics is looking for its next funds. Several projects are being drafted with collaborators at the moment.

Regarding high power computation:

• PRACE DECI Navigator in Portugal suffers from 2nd critical incident in 6 months, leading to present shutdown of the production. Edit: it may come back during week #26.
• Note that PRACE DECI subprogram will not be renewed, although it was an excellent and modular program that provided nice timeline along with nice resources to research groups like ours.
• Mitigation procedures are being put in place to maintain obligations regarding collaborations. Edit: ELI beamlines kindly opened their computer to me since June 20th.

A period of proposal drafting has started in the department, and the group of Ultrafast Photonics counts on applying to several funding sources this year to secure financial independence for next years.

On April 1st, a proposal to study the transient excitation of electrons in particular kinds of solids was submitted to the national grant agency. The results are usually known in December of the year of submission. Only 2.5 positions would be potentially funded by this proposal, for people who have already been selected. To secure our positions on a longer time, I am presently participating in drafting of other proposals, which larger amount of funds for salaries.

IT4I.cz is the national supercomputer of Czech Republic. Users have a representation as IT4I Users Council. T. J.-Y. Derrien is now officially secretary of this IT4I Users Council. See https://www.it4i.cz/en/for-users/user-council

Although the funding context is quite intense, several presentations in international conferences will be provided this year.
1. March 14th-16th, 2022: T. Derrien, invited oral presentation in FemtoMat, Mauterndorf, Austria. Main topic this year will be dealing with band structure modification during laser irradiation.
2. March 14th-18th, 2022: collaborator assoc. prof. M. Kozak will present results of joint collaboration on high harmonic generation at DPG meeting (Erlangen).
3. April, 6th-7th 2022: T. Derrien, oral presentation at SPIE Photonics EU, Strasbourg, France.
4. May 30th – June 3rd, 2022: Prof. N. M. Bulgakova will present a work on energy absorption and redistribution channels in silicon, that includes some TDDFT results from our group. EMRS Spring Meeting 2022.
5. September 11th-16th, 2022 [CANCELED]: T. Derrien, invited oral presentation at ALT22, Arcachon, France. The topic of Arcachon conference remains to be defined.

Edit: due to geopolitical context, my invited oral presentation of ALT22 is now canceled.

On Wed. 9th Feb., T. Derrien delivered an invited presentation at the webinar “Why do researchers need to be mobile?”, organized by the Mendel University (Brno, Czech Republic) in context of the EU project “ASFORCLIC”. The webinar also included a presentation of Fullbright fellowships (Czech <-> USA exchanges), COST actions and Erasmus+.

As fellow of Marie Curie individual fellowship and main contact of Atlantic project in the Czech Republic, T. Derrien presented the outcomes of the two mobility projects on career development.

A new student will be joining our group soon. MSc. Ghassan ABER is from Casablanca (Morocco), and he will be working on time-dependent density functional theory. Within the group, he will support the TDDFT activities with comparison to experimental results obtained by various collaborators, along with preparing his PhD thesis at the HiLASE Centre. He will also contribute to the ATLANTIC project. We are very much looking forward!

The price of electrical energy has been skyrocketing last year. As a result, the cheapest supplier of Czech Republic, Bohemia Energy has now bankrupted, forcing several institutions to transfer their contract to other, more expensive suppliers. Unfortunately, cost for electricity in future will be multiplied by a factor close to 4 (and a factor 10 during the time to negotiate new contracts!), hence impacting the activities in High Power Computation of Czech Republic. Note that similar problems took place in Poland and Norway last months as well.

IT4Innovation, the Czech national supercomputing facility located in Ostrava, has expressed difficulties through their website. On Tuesday, the IT4I users council has met to discuss this extraordinary situation, where mitigation actions were discussed.

Our other computational center, provided by PRACE DECI in Portugal, got an incident due to electrical interruption that has damaged their facility. Finally, the production has restarted in the end of January.

As a result, our high power computation activities have been strongly reduced in second part of January and could partially restart at the end of the month. While our PRACE-DECI project will continue to fully support our activities, it is unlikely that our access to IT4I will be operating again before the end of our project IT4I-OPEN-20th FLAMENCO on March 21st, thus decreasing our number of available core-hours on that project.

Since September, the activities of the group were reported in 5 oral presentations at international conferences, including 2 invited talks. 4 of these oral presentations are available on Youtube.

1. Advanced Laser Technologies (Moscow), 2 presentations from the group (incl. 1 invited).
2. Ulltrafast Light (Moscow), Invited talk (20 min), 1 invited presentation from the group.
3. Actual problems in Solid State Physics (Belarus), 2 oral contributions (10 min each), from the group.

1. T. J.-Y. Derrien, Y. Levy, N.M. Bulgakova,
   Assessment of the time-dependent density functional theory for investigating femtosecond laser energy absorption by metals, invited oral presentation (20 min)
   September 6th, 2021
   Advanced Laser Technologies (ALT21)
   Moscow (online)
   Russian Federation
   
2. K. Hlinomaz, Y. Levy, T. Derrien, N. M. Bulgakova
   Numerical Modeling of Thermal Response of Molybdenum Thin Film on Different Substrates Irradiated by Short Laser Pulse (oral presentation, 15 min).
   September 6th, 2021
   Advanced Laser Technologies (ALT21)
   Moscow (online)
   Russian Federation
   
3. T. J.-Y. Derrien
   Ultrafast excitation of electrons in crystals: insights from non-equilibrium band structure calculations (invited oral presentation, 20 min)
   October 4th-8th, 2021
   Ultrafast Light (Lebedev Institute)
   Moscow (online)
   Russian Federation
   
4. T. J.-Y. Derrien
   Ultrafast excitation of electrons in crystals: insights from non-equilibrium band structure calculations (oral presentation, 10 min)
   November 22nd-26th, 2021
   Actual problems in Solid State Physics (APSSP 2021)
   Minsk (online)
   Belarus
   
5. K. Hlinomaz , A. S. Fedotov, I. Timoshchenko, A. Kozlovski, Y. Levy , T. J.-Y. Derrien, V. P. Zhukov, O. G. Romanov, N. M. Bulgakova
   Towards Description of Mechanical Damage of Thin Molybdenum Film upon Pulsed Laser Irradiation (oral presentation, 10 min).
   November 22nd-26th, 2021
   Actual problems in Solid State Physics (APSSP 2021)
   Minsk (online)
   Belarus

Presentation of contributions from Bc. Kristyna Gazdova will be introduced in next conferences.

Prof. N. M. Bulgakova has submitted a chapter of 60 pages, 22 figures and 299 references for a book of Springer publishing house being in preparation by editors prof. Razvan Stoian (Laboratoire Hubert Curien) and prof. Jörn Bonse (BAM Berlin).

Dr. T. J.-Y. Derrien and Y. Levy gratefully thank prof. Bulgakova for the kind invitation to contribute jointly to the chapter that has a good probability to be the 1st chapter of the book.

Looking forward!