After two years in the lab, our colleague Sudipta Saha left this week-end for a new postdoctoral position in the group of Pävi Törmä, in Aalto University, Finland. If he continues like this, next one will be on Svalbard islands… More seriously, Sudipta contributed efficiently to the projects he was involved in, in particular the tricky setup of a new Mueller experiment in the UV, and we will miss his competences, but also his constant good mood and his smile. Good luck to him !
Our most recent publication appeared one week ago, in the “ASAP” section of Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. In this work, we have developed a ROKE (resonant optical Kerr effect) spectroscopy setup to monitor the reorientational relaxation time of a solute molecule into a solvent, with a high accuracy and sensitivity. The key experimental factors were to tune the pump and the probe laser beams to the resonant wavelength of the solute, in order to amplify the signal, as well as the heterodyne detection, allowing to determine the relaxation time accurately. The accepted version can be downloaded from our publications page.
… a swiss journal, Chemische Rundschau, interviewed Thomas Ebbesen after the publication of our paper in Science review. At that time, we were a very small team, located rue de l’Université in the old building of Physics Faculty, as ISIS building was under construction. This is probably our first group picture ever and founding it back on my shelves gave me the idea to create a page for our old group pictures. Have fun !
It will soon be three weeks that we have the pleasure to welcome a new brasilian student in the lab, Arthur Fonseca. He is currently doing a phD at the Physics Institute of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, under the supervision of Pr. Paulo Maia Neto. He is doing experimental and theoretical studies on vortex beams and light-matter interaction in optical tweezers. Arthur will stay 6 months among us, welcome to him !
