On June 16, the General Assembly of the Extreme Light Infrastructure European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ELI ERIC) appointed X-GoLP member Marta F as member of its International Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (ISTAC) for a period of three years. The ISTAC members appointed by the General Assembly are high-level personalities internationally recognized for their scientific and technical expertise in the scientific and technical fields relevant to ELI ERIC, and/or for their management of scientific organizations and international user research infrastructures. The criteria for selection included an interdisciplinary mix of scientific and technical experience, institutional balance, diversity of background and gender, and previous experience with ELI.
The purpose of the ISTAC of ELI ERIC is to advise the ELI ERIC General Assembly and the Director General on scientific and technical issues that bear on the quality and the full and effective utilization of ELI facilities, as well as…

The paper “Ultra-broadband near-IR NOPAs based on the nonlinear crystals BiBO and YCOB” by Mario Galletti et al. is featured on the cover of the latest issue of the journal High Power Laser Science and Engineering.
In this work, the GoLP/IPFN researchers from Universidade de Lisboa, in collaboration with colleagues from the Central Laser Facility, STFC, United Kingdom, consider two alternative crystals for both low- and high-energy, few-cycle optical parametric chirped pulse amplification: bismuth borate (BiBO) and yttrium calcium oxyborate (YCOB).
The experimental work was performed at IST Laboratory for Intense Lasers (L2I), where they developed a noncollinear optical parametric amplification (NOPA) setup seeded by a continuum pulse generated from a sapphire plate, operating in the near-infrared region, in order to test each crystal.
For a 5 mm YCOB crystal, they obtained an amplified bandwidth of 200 nm and a gain of ~100, and for a 2.5 mm BiBO crystal they obtained an amplified bandwidth of 240 nm…

Thomas Wodzinski defended successfully his PhD thesis on October 14, 2020 and passed with Distinction. He was awarded a fellowship in the APPLAuSE doctoral program on Plasma Science and Engineering in 2015 and joined GoLP for his thesis under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Marta Fajardo (IST) and Dr. Elke Plönjes-Palm (FLASH, DESY).

Mario Galletti defended successfully his PhD thesis on June 4, 2020, being awarded the top final grade of Approved with Distinction Cum Laude. During his PhD, Mario worked on different topics ranging from optical parametric oscillators and amplifiers, laser-matter interaction and laser and plasma diagnostics.

We are opening a call for partial time Junior Research Placements (Estágios de Introdução à Investigação) for March – September 2020 (extendable). See details here.

Luís Braga defended successfully his MSc thesis on November 23, being awarded a final grade of 18/20.In his work, Luís evaluates the role of beam collimation at the input of a large aperture, single-pass grating compressor. The experimental setup investigated is the compressor at Vulcan’s laser Target Area West.An analytical model for space-time pulse propagation was developed, which adequately explains the influence of beam collimation on the observed pulse front tilt (PFT). Additionally, a new type of single-shot autocorrelator, capable of measuring pulse duration and PFT independently, was demonstrated.With this, a new mechanism for detecting and controlling the output PFT from a compressor was demonstrated. This work was a successful collaboration between our team at IST and the Vulcan team at the Central Laser Facility, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.Congratulations to all those involved, especially to Luís!

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Arthur Ashkin for “optical tweezers and their application to biological systems” and to Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland for “their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses”.  Mourou and Strickland invented  the Chirped Pulse Amplification method (CPA) thirty year ago. The CPA method is used to amplify ultra-short laser pulses (from picosecond to femtosecond). The large spectral width of short pulse lasers is used to enlarge the duration of the pulses in a linear dispersive optical path (stretcher). The pulses become linearly chirped (with larger duration and lower power) and are amplified (gain energy) at a comparable lower intensity (below optical materials damage threshold). After the amplification is concluded the pulse (amplified and chirped) is most of the times moved into a vacuum chamber where a dispersive optical path removes the pulse chirp shortening it to almost its original duration….

Congratulations to Rui Oliveira e Silva for successfully defend his MSc thesis in Physics Engineering!
In his thesis entitled “Design of optical spectrometers with RamSERS project”, Rui evaluates the parameters for the design of two Raman spectrometers , with the goal of achieving very competitive specifications using off-the-shelf optical elements. The design is verified by paraxial analysis and Zemax.
The ultimate goal of the project is to develop a portable device for the identification of cancer biomarkers through Raman spectroscopy.
Well done, Rui!
 

Celso João, who successfully defended his PhD thesis in 2016, has now been awarded the Prize for the Best PhD Thesis in Optics by the Portuguese Society for Optics and Photonics (SPOF).
Celso, a postdoc researcher and member of the Group for Lasers and Plasmas, has specialised in high power laser design and development. In his thesis entitled “Diode-pumped solid-state lasers for optical parametric amplification pumping”, he describes the implementation of new two diode-pumped ytterbium lasers for pumping OPCPA amplifiers.
The first laser amplifier is installed at IST, while the second was added to the front end of the PHELIX laser at GSI Darmstadt, through a collaboration with IOQ/IAP-FSU Jena. The work was supervised by Prof. Gonçalo Figueira (IST), head of the Laboratory for Intense Lasers in Lisbon.
SPOF was created in 2009 with the goals of promoting optics from the viewpoints of research, training and education. The national prize for the…

The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation announced last week the winners of the 2016 edition of its prestigious Prize for Stimulus to Scientific Research. Victor Hariton is one of the two winners in the physics category, for his project “Fab-Laser – Femtosecond ablation of biological samples with shaped laser pulses”.