Mukhtar Hussain defended successfully his PhD thesis on October 20, 2021 and passed with Distinction. He was awarded a fellowship in the APPLAuSE doctoral program on Plasma Science and Engineering in 2016 and joined GoLP for his thesis under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Marta Fajardo, and co-supervised by Dr. Gareth Williams (also IST) and Dr. Hamed Merdji (LIDYL, CEA-Saclay).

During his PhD, Mukhtar used ultrashort laser pulses to investigate harmonic generation in solids. He studied the interplay between perturbative and non-perturbative effects in 2nd and 3rd harmonic generation in MgO and chromium-doped MgO, also showing that by introducing dopants into simple crystals  the electronic structure can be shaped to tailor the non-linear optical response. He also investigated the nonlinear propagation effects of the ultrafast intense near-infrared pulses in a range of wide bandgap dielectrics, mapping the crystal response by measuring the polarization and ellipticity response of the harmonics.