Today, we celebrated Chris’s departure for his SCGSR Fellowship stay at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory with a group lunch outing. We look forward to continuing to work with Chris, and his SCGSR advisor Prof. Matthias Kling, as he develops new optical field sampling technologies for the Linac Coherent Light Source!

Congratulations to Dr. Chau Truong and Dr. Didarul Alam for successfully completing their PhDs! Chau defended her dissertation “Progress towards Attosecond Science with a Turn-key Industrial-grade Ytterbium Laser” in November, while Didar defended his dissertation “Probing Electron Correlations with First-Principles Calculations of The High-Harmonic Spectrum in Solids”  (co-supervised with Dr. Volodymyr Turkowski) in August. Both of them attended the Fall commencement ceremonies, where Mike hooded them!

Chris Lantigua has been awarded an SCGSR fellowship from DOE to perform reserach at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory with Prof. Matthias Kling. You can read more about the award in COS News! https://sciences.ucf.edu/news/chris-lantigua-attosecond-physics-research/

Chau Truong successfully defended her dissertation “Progress Towards Attosecond Science with a Turn-Key Industrial Grade Ytterbium Laser” today! Many congratulations to Dr. Truong!!!

We had a great time at the CLEO conference in San Jose last week, meeting up with old friends and making new friends! We were well represented: Mike gave an invited talk; Chau, Troie, and Dipendra gave contributed talks; Christian gave a postdeadline talk; and Troie and Didar presented posters (with associated lightning talks)! Some of us also had the opportunity to visit labs at SLAC and UC Berkeley.

Our paper “A light-field synthesizer based on multidimensional solitary states in hollow-core fibers”, published in Optics Letters (https://doi.org/10.1364/OL.487607), has been highlighted as an Editor’s Pick. This work was led by PhD student Chau Truong. Congratulations, Chau!

Graduate student Chris Lantigua presented his work “Average Power Scaling of Pulse Compression in Molecular Gas-Filled Hollow Core Fibers” at the UFO XIII conference in Bariloche, Argentina! His presentation was selected for the 2nd place prize for Best Student Presentation! Congratulations, Chris!

Aamir Mushtaq has joined the LUMAS group as a postdoctoral researcher. Previously, he was a postdoc at Ohio State University, where he worked on nonlinear optical measurements of novel materials with Prof. Enam Chowdhury. Welcome, Aamir!

Postdoctoral researcher Yangyang Liu has moved on to a faculty position at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China. We will miss Yangyang, but we look forward to celebrating the successes of his new group and future collaborations!

Our article “Electron-electron interactions and high-order harmonics in solids” was published online in Physical Review B (https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.106.235124)! This work, led by PhD student Didarul Alam, uses ab initio computational techniques to study the behavior of high-order harmonics in strongly-correlated solids. Congrats to Didar on his first publication!