Laserlab-Europe AISBL

Laserlab-Europe Talk: KiMoPack - A python Package for Kinetic Modeling of the Chemical Mechanism
2022-11-30 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/Berlin) | Online
Speaker: Jens Uhlig (Lund University, Sweden)

Watch the Talk

Jens Uhlig (Lund University, Sweden) will present KiMoPack, an analysis tool for the kinetic modeling of transient spectroscopic data.
KiMoPack enables a state-of-the-art analysis routine including data preprocessing and standard fitting (global analysis), as well as fitting of complex (target) kinetic models, interactive viewing of (fit) results, and multi-experiment analysis via user accessible functions and a graphical user interface (GUI) enhanced interface.
KiMoPack is open source and provides a comprehensive front-end for preprocessing, fitting and plotting of 2-dimensional data that simplifies the access to a powerful python-based data-processing system and forms the foundation for a well-documented, reliable, and reproducible data analysis.
Jens is an associate professor at the Division of Chemical Physics, in the Department of Chemistry, Lund University, and is an expert in time-resolved optical and X-ray methods, particularly on ultra-fast timescales.

Laserlab-Europe Talk: Laser microscopy for the study of infectious disease
2022-10-19 16:00 - 17:00
Speaker: Dave Clarke (CLF, UK)

Watch the Talk

Infectious diseases of humans, animals, and plants have very significant societal and economic impacts. The COVID-19 pandemic is an obvious example, and another major threat is the increasing problem of antimicrobial resistance. Climate change is bringing increasing pressure on crops, making them more susceptible to diseases, with potentially serious consequences for food supplies.
Optical microscopy techniques have made a significant impact across many areas of human, animal, and plant biology, and research into infectious disease is no exception. In this talk Dave Clarke (CLF) will give an overview of some of the latest laser-based optical microscopy methods, and show examples from the Central Laser Facility’s research programme showing how they are providing valuable insights into the biology underlying infectious disease, and helping point the way to new treatments.

Laserlab-Europe Talk: Investigations of Laser-Plasma Interaction and hot electron generation in Direct-Drive Inertial Confinement Fusion: approaching to the Shock Ignition irradiation regime
2022-06-22 16:00 - 17:00
Speaker: Gabriele Cristoforetti (INO-CNR, Italy)

Watch the Talk

One of the main concerns of Shock Ignition (SI) scheme to Inertial Confinement Fusion is the growth of parametric instabilities in the plasma corona, such as Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS), Stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS) and Two Plasmon Decay (TPD). Their extent can be tremendous during the interaction of the high intensity laser peak (I~1016 W cm-2) with the precompressed corona and they are expected to scatter a significant amount of laser energy and to generate large fluxes of suprathermal electrons (HE), with a considerable impact on both the shock pressure and the preheat of the fuel capsule. The non-linear character of these instabilities becomes progressively more important with the increase of laser intensity, which makes the extrapolation of analytical models quite inaccurate; a more detailed understanding of these processes therefore calls for experiments dedicated at investigating Laser Plasma Interaction (LPI) in conditions as close as possible to those envisaged in SI.
In this presentation, we report results obtained in experiments at Gekko XII, PALS and VULCAN laser facilities, focussed at investigating LPI and at identifying the mechanisms originating suprathermal hot electrons. In all of them, Stimulated Raman Scattering and Two Plasmon Decay were accurately and time-resolved characterized by means of spectroscopic and calorimetric tools, while a full set of diagnostics – including Ka imaging and spectroscopy, Bremsstrahlung cannons and Magnetic Electron Spectrometers – were used for achieving an energy-resolved characterization of hot electrons. The regime of interaction in these experiments is significantly different, with laser intensity ranging from Il2 ~2·1014 Wmm2/cm2 to ~2·1016 Wmm2/cm2, plasma density scalelength rising from 50 to 400 mm, laser wavelength going from the UV to the IR range, laser irradiation in single- and multi-beam configuration, allowing a good understanding of the role played by the different experimental parameters.
After critically discussing the experimental results, we will show here the future directions of our research in this field and the aims of the forthcoming experiments.

Laserlab-Europe Talk: AI for X-ray scattering
2022-06-08 16:00 - 17:00
Speaker: Nico Hoffmann (HZDR, Germany)

Watch the Talk

The long term and sustainable success of the X-ray community essentially depends on its ability to meet growing challenges in handling and analyzing data of increasing volume and complexity.
Machine Learning (ML) provide a smart solution enabling dramatically increasing the output of X-ray scattering facilities regarding acceleration of the data analysis, optimization of beam time usage and, consequently, growth of publication rate. Analysis of scattering data is a very time-consuming process as it requires solving an ill-posed inverse problem to infer properties of the imaged object.
We will be discussing two state-of-the-art methods to solve this task: 1) ML-based estimation of the most important parameters of the object in a single step given the experimentally acquired scattering image; 2) Iterative ML-assisted phasing based on automatic differentiation that can be very easily used for fast reconstruction of multiple X-ray scattering modalities such as CDI, mono- & polychromatic Ptychography as well as Holography.
Some parameters exhibit low contribution to the acquired data which also hampers reliable predictions and discrimination of these parameters. We show that normalising flows can be used to recover the predictive posterior distribution of these parameters to resolve ambiguous situations and provide information about the reliability of the estimate.

Laserlab-Europe Talk: Matterwave Optics as a key Quantum Technology
2022-05-25 16:00 - 17:00
Speaker: Wolf von Klitzing (ULF-FORTH, Greece)

Watch the Talk

The famous particle-wave duality states that all particles are waves and all waves are particles. Most of us are aware of the fact that light can be thought of consisting of photons. It is less well known that atoms can behave just like (matter)waves, which can be manipulated in a manner analogous to light: We now can create matterwave lenses, waveguides, interferometers and even matterwave amplifiers and lasers.
In this colloquium, I will introduce the basics of matterwave (optics) as well as some of its applications to precision sensing. I will also present some of the research results of the Cretan Matterwaves Group, where we have demonstrated a CERN-like matter-wave accelerator and fully-coherent matterwave guide [1] as well as matterwave-lensing down to the pico-kelvin regime.
References
[1] Saurabh Pandey et al. Hypersonic Bose–Einstein condensates in accelerator rings – Nature 570 7760 205–209 (2019) DOI:/10.1038/s41586-019-1273-5

Laserlab-Europe Talk: Adapting to an emerging pandemic to find a role for medical optics in COVID-19 patients and more
2022-05-04 16:00 - 17:00
Speaker: Turgut Durduran (ICFO, Spain)

Watch the Talk

When COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns started, we sought to evaluate whether our technologies for evaluating tissue oxygen metabolism and hermodynamics with photonics could be helpful. A sequence of coincidences, bright postdocoral fellows and an overworked intensive care physician with an amazing insight into the needs came together for us to embark in an international, multi-center clinical trial with minimal funding. This then led to a Horizon 2020 project partially enabled by our longstanding collaborations in LaserLab JRAs. In the talk i will describe the technologies, their fundamental physical background, how we are using them and what we believe their future impact would be.

Laserlab-Europe Talk: Ignition, a dream that came true
2022-04-06 16:00 - 17:00
Speaker: Sébastien le Pape (CNRS-LULI, France)

Watch the Talk

Fusion energy has been the driving force in the High Energy Density (HED) community for more than fifty years but especially since the start of the National Ignition Campaign in 2009 on the National Ignition facility (LLNL, USA). The National Ignition Campaign, though a marvel in term of laser technology and data quality in this challenging regime, has failed to achieve ignition. This failure has shed lights on gaps of our understanding of fundamental plasma properties such as thermal transport or emissivity. Following these initial difficulties, evolution of the design (higher adiabat, new ablator, new hohlraum conditions) has led to significant improvement in implosion performance over the years and finally to performance close to ignition (Q=0.7) in the summer of 2021. The talk will go over these evolutions and why they led to the recent successes obtained on the NIF.
The talk is organised within the framework of the Laserlab-Europe Expert Group on Laser-driven Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) – Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE).

Laserlab-Europe Talk: Lasers and batteries
2022-03-23 16:00 - 17:00
Optical spectroscopy of battery degradation – Optical spectroscopy of materials for batteries – Laser micro/nano fabrication of materials for energy storage applications
We are pleased to announce the Laserlab-Europe Talks on Lasers and batteries
Speakers:

Akshay Rao (Cambridge University): Optical spectroscopy of battery degradation
Benedetto Bozzini (POLIMI): Optical spectroscopy of materials for batteries
Emmanuel Stratakis (IESL-FORTH): Ultrashort pulsed laser assisted fabrication of materials for batteries applications

Watch the Talks

Laserlab-Europe Talk: Next Generation imaging and image-guided diagnosis and therapy for cancer
2022-02-23 16:00 - 17:00
Time domain multiwavelength diffuse optics in breast cancer management – Theranostics with photoacoustic tomography and photosensitisers – Multimodal photoacoustic imaging of tumor angiogenesis
We are pleased to announce the Laserlab-Europe Talks: Next Generation imaging and image-guided diagnosis and therapy for cancer
Speakers:

Paola Taroni (CUSBO): Time domain multiwavelength diffuse optics in breast cancer management
Luis Arnaut (CLL): Theranostics with photoacoustic tomography and photosensitisers
Jithin Jose (FUJIFILM Visualsonics): Multimodal photoacoustic imaging of tumor angiogenesis
Jan Grimm (MSKC New York): The practical use of cancer imaging technologies in hospitals

Watch the Talks

Laserlab-Europe Talk: Multi-photon 3D lithography for sub-100 nm additive manufacturing of inorganics
2022-02-09 16:00 - 17:00
Speaker: Mangirdas Malinauskas (VULRC, Lithuania)

Watch the Talk

3D micro-/nano-structures enables miniaturization and enhancement of functionalities and integrations of devices for the fields of photonics, microfluidics, micromechanics, microelectronics, and microoptics.
Multi-photon lithography (also widely known as two-photon polymerization) as a laser direct writing technique offers flexibility to produce 3D structures for rapid prototyping and additive manufacturing purposes. Recent developments of this ultrafast laser technique supported with the advances in material sciences allows 3D printing of inorganic structures routinely via combination of maskless photopolymerization and thermal post-treatment (pyrolysis or calcination).
The current achievements are very promising for technical applications where highly resilient structures (made out inertial materials for extended durability) are required, such as harsh environments, high intensity optics, and open space. In this talk the physical and chemical principles for 3D nano-structuring of inorganics employing laser lithography, hybrid and composite materials as well as post-treatment are covered. The most recent advances are overviewed and the major achievements are highlighted, among them are: sub-100 nm feature fabrication, crystalline nanostructures, resilient, high refractive index and transparent materials. Advances and limitations within the context of the emerging trends and potential immediate applications are discussed in details.
