We have the pleasure to welcome two new post-doctoral researchers in our group since the 1st of July : Marcus Seidel and Kalaivanan Nagajaran.

Kalaivanan is coming from Kerala, India, and did his phD in the School of Chemistry of the Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research of Thiruvananthapuram on the “Strategies to Access Triplet Excited State in Core-Twisted Perylenediimides”, under the supervision of Dr. Mahesh Hariharan.

Marcus is coming from Germany and the topic of his phD work was the development of high power femtosecond thin-disk laser, where his research was focused on pulse compression, carrier-envelope-phase stabilization and broadband mid-infrared generation. It has been prepared in the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, in the group of Pr. Ferenc Krausz.

Morevover, Ming-Hao Li, who was with us for a Master 2 training, will stay in the lab and continue for a phD as he received a grant from the Ecole Doctorale de Chimie. Congratulations to him !

Xiaolan Zhong, who has been working in our group as a postdoc for three years and a half is leaving us this week. She has obtained an assistant professor position at Beihang University in Beijing and we wish her good luck for the future !

James Hutchison, our dear bloody fair dinkum aussie mate, is leaving today for a 18 months secondment in Melbourne University, we wish him good luck there !

Since three weeks and for the next months, we are welcoming two master 2 students in the team, Elias Akiki, from Lebanon and Minghao Li, from China.

Gabriel Schnoering, who defended a few months ago, left the lab last month and just started a week ago his new position, at the Physikalisches Institut in Stuttgart University.

We wish him and his family all the best !

A nice picture of all the ISIS members (at least those present this day, February 21) was taken last week in front of the institute. For information, ISIS will expand next year as the works for the building extension just started this month, a nice way to celebrate its 15th birthday !

Yoseline Rosales Cabara joined our group on October 1st for starting a phD thesis on optical trapping under the supervision of Cyriaque Genet. She did her master degree in the University of Geneva, working on two-photon excited fluorescence by quantum correlated photon pairs. She is installed in room 120 and her email adress is rosalescabara (at) unistra (dot) fr.

As we all miss him in the lab, our former postdoc Atef Shalabney, now in Braude College in Israël, will be back for a three weeks research stay from October 3rd. If you wish to meet him, he will be installed in room 107.

We are pleased to announce for next week a mini-symposium with two seminars on optical forces given by members of the PhD jury of Gabriel Schnoering:

Prof. Mikael KALL, from the Department of Physics, Chalmers University of Technology,Göteborg, Sweden, on Optically driven plasmonic nanorotors

and Prof. Romain QUIDANT from ICFO – The Institute of Photonic Sciences, Barcelona, Spain, on Nano-optomechanics with an optically levitated nanoparticle

This mini-symposium will take place in the conference room of ISIS, on Wednesday 21th of September at 3pm.

Then the next day, on Thursday 22. at 9.30am, Gabriel will defend his PhD thesis entitled  On the Brownian dynamics of a particle in a bistable optical trap. This work has been done under the supervision of Dr. Cyriaque Genet and Prof. T.W. Ebbesen.  A small reception will then follow at the 6th floor of ISIS.

May the (optical) force be with him…