Kalaivanan Nagarajan left our lab one week ago to go back in India where he will take a position of reader at the Department of Chemical Sciences of TIFR, Mumbai. He spent 5 years in the lab, during which he had time to build strong relationships with people here, to evolve as a scientist with a pure chemistry education to a much more physics one and to forge a family. His presence in the team was precious thanks to his energy and enthusiasm. No doubt that his new colleagues will benefit from this and we wish him all the best for the future !

With a bit of delay, we introduce you to our new Master 2 student, Antoine Tartar. He started his training in the lab in the beginning of February and he is currently working on setting up a new optical trap under vacuum with Rémi Goerlich and Luis Pires, under the supervision of Cyriaque Genet.

Our colleague Sandeep Kulangara, who was here for a postdoctoral position for 2 years, left us one week ago to go back in India. We greatly appreciated his discreet and efficient presence in the team. He started again in his former position of assistant professor at Government Victoria College Palakkad.
Good luck to him !

Lucia Di Virgilio joined us last week and will stay in our lab for two months. She is a phD student at MPI Mainz, under the supervision of Pr Misha Bonn and part of the UHMob program. Lucia is originated from Basilicata region in Italy and did her master on cold atoms in Pisa, where she first discovered physics in cavities. Now she studies the transport properties of conductive molecular materials under strong coupling regime, thanks to Thz spectroscopy. If you want to meet her, she will be staying in room 106 of our lab. Welcome to her !

Gian-Lorenzo Paravicini-Bagliani, who was working with us as a postdoctoral researcher since two years, left the lab in December. He found a position in Zürich, in the research and development department of Sensirion, which is a young company developing and producing a range of innovative digital environmental sensors for different industries. We wish him good luck in this new job !

Minghao Li arrived in the lab in 2017 for a master training, stayed for a phD and defended about one year ago , then spent one more year with us for a postdoc position. But after 1697 days as he counted himself, time of departure has arrived and he left the team last week. He is now starting a new postdoctoral position in the Quantum Sensing group of Pr Maletinsky at the University of Basel.

We will miss his good mood, his energy and his nice photos and we wish him all the best for the future !

We have the pleasure to welcome a new postdoctoral researcher in our group, Yoichi Sasaki, coming from Japan. He received his phD degree from Kyushu University in 2021 on near-infrared-to-visible photon upconversion, under the supervision of Prof. Nobuhiro Yanai and Prof. Nobuo Kimizuka. His research interests are photochemistry, physical chemistry and material chemistry. Welcome to him !

We have started the year with two members less in the group : Robrecht Vergauwe and Samuel Albert have indeed finished their postdoctoral contracts in the end of December 2020. They were both very supportive for younger labs members and involved in organizing conviviality moments, contributing to the good cohesion of the team. We will miss their presence in the lab and we wish them all the best for their future !

Source : Minghao Li

Since a week, we have the pleasure to welcome our first brazilian lab member, Luis Pires. Luis is a physicist by education, now specialist of optical tweezers and colloidal interactions. He received his master and PhD from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and did a six month internship at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis, USA. Welcome to him !