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iStOMPS at the Lange Nacht der Forschung 2024

On 24.05.2024, the Lange Nacht der Forschung (Long Night of Research) commenced in Austria. Lorenz, Rahul, and Sebastian from iStOMPS participated in this fantastic event with an exhibit at the main building of the University of Vienna. Together with members of the Backus group (laser spectroscopy), they presented a hand-built, do-it-yourself-style absorption spectrometer for visible light. We (and the visitors) had lots of fun in discovering how colors work. There even was a detective story about the ominous Prof. U. V. Vis for the kids to solve!

© derknopfdruecker.com

The spectrometer consists of easily available parts: an LED torchlight, a reading lens, two playing cards, a simple optical grating, a strip of white paper, and a webcam. The parts are arranged on a plywood frame with some 3D-printed mounts and contained in a black cardboard box that can be closed. When the torchlight is turned on, its light falls on the grating and is split into a rainbow on the paperstrip. The webcam sends pictures of the rainbow to a connected laptop that visualizes the absorption spectrum of colorful foils or table scatter gemstones.

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1st ViRAPID Workshop 2024

From 26.02.2024 to 29.02.2024, Lorenz attended the 1st ViRAPID Workshop 2024, which was held in Vienna. The topic of this conference “Bringing together rare event sampling, excited state dynamics and machine learning“ and thereby aimed at uniting experts active and interested in the fields of rare event sampling, machine learning, and excited states.

Group picture of the attendees of the 1st ViRAPID Workshop 2024.

It was a great opportunity for Lorenz to see the current limitations in each of the fields and to participate at a dialogue about advancing and developing new ideas bridging the fields.

Lorenz explains details on the simulation setup on his poster.

In his poster contribution, Lorenz showed his recently published results from Finite-Differences Time-Domain (FDTD) simulations and explained the workflow to incorporate these simulations results to feed Molecular Dynamics software on his poster “Non-adiabatic Molecular Dynamics Coupled to External Electromagnetic Field Simulations”.

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Visit at the Paul Scherer Institute

From 21 to 27 November 2023, I visited Dr. Xinhua Xie, one of our project collaborators, at PSI (Switzerland). On the one hand, during that week I participated in an experiment on X-ray-induced Augen ionization of molecules. On the other hand, I learned a lot of background information about free electron lasers (FELs). In addition to academics, the SwissFEL and SLS tour guided by Dr. Xinhua was also very impressive.

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iStOMPS at Conferences

European School on Magnetism 2023

From 4 to 15 September 2023, I participated in the 2023 European School on Magnetism (ESM 2023). The topic was “Nanomagnetism for emerging technologies”, and the school was held in a mixed format: both onsite in Madrid, Spain, and online. The online lectures and tutorials covered a wide range of topics from fundamentals of magnetism to advanced detection and fabrication techniques, as well as modern applications. I also used the chance to present our work online and was awarded a poster prize, which included a voucher for free attendance to the International Conference on Magnetism conference ICM2024 to be held in Bologna. I am looking forward to attending this conference, which would provide a great opportunity for further networking and sharing iStOMPS ideas among the magnetic community.

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iStOMPS at Conferences

AttoChem Young Scientist Symposium 2023

From 13.09.2023 to 15.09.2023, Liza and Lorenz attended the AttoChem Young Scientist Symposium 2023, which was held in Vienna. The Symposium was organized by a team of scientists at TU Wien, including part of the iStOMPS team – Alessandra, Hongtao, and Liza. The very open and interactive format, including a panel discussion at the last day of the symposium, allowed us to catch a peek into the “Atto Universe”. Liza and Lorenz had the opportunity to show their work within iStOMPS in both flash presentations as well as individual posters:

Lorenz showed his most recent results from Finite-Differences Time-Domain (FDTD) simulations on his poster “Magnetic-only Optical Spectroscopy with Ultrafast Laser Pulses”.

Liza presented the experimental setups (for details see Subproject A, Subproject B) for magnetic-only optical spectroscopy on her poster “Generation of Isolated Strong Transient Magnetic Fields for Magneto-Optical Spectroscopy”.

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iStOMPS at Conferences

DoSChem Symposium 2023

In July, Lorenz and Rahul represented iStOMPS on the 3rd International Student Symposium of the Doctoral School in Chemistry, that took place in Vienna.
As a major event of the year the DoSChem symposium gathers students and faculty from different fields in Chemistry, allowing the students to present their research and to interact and exchange on all levels.

On this event, Lorenz gave a talk about “Particle-In-Cell Simulations for Magneto-Only Optical Spectroscopy”, in which he explained the numerical simulations within the iStOMPS project and its implications from a chemical perspective. Moreover, he outlined the possible applications and the impact for spectroscopy.
Rahul on the other hand, presented a poster “Computing Energies with Minimal Effort (for the computer)“, in which he presented a scheme for computing accurate energies for Eu3+ ion efficiently. The new method is based on selecting only the states that couple with each other for a perturbation theory treatment.

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iStOMPS goes (to the) wild (boars)

On July, 12th our team enjoyed a beautiful sunny summer day going hiking in one of the last pieces of the original Viennese Woods – that is the Lainzer Tiergarten (or Zoo), located on the outskirts of the city. Equipped with some good sandwiches and a lot of fun and joy, we made a “big round” in this special recreational area. Since Ale lives in Hütteldorf, as a local, she proposed the following route (highlighted below), entailing some nice panoramic view points, such as the “Hubertuswarte” (see first picture below) and the “Kaiserwiese” (second picture).

The Lainzer Zoo offers a unique natural landscape with a wealth of flora and fauna — e.g., there are generally lots of wild boars — as well as cultural-historical exhibitions in the Hermesvilla. In other words, it is a place that offers relaxation, experience in nature and education and, as you can judge from our smiles, our iStOMPS team enjoyed this excursion very much!

iStOMPS on top of the “Hubertus Warte”

Panoravic viewpoint of the “Kaiserwiese”

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iStOMPS at Conferences

CLEO Europe 2023

On June 26-30, 2023, Lorenz and Elizaveta attended the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics/Europe – European Quantum Electronics Virtual Conferences (CLEO®/Europe-EQEC 2023), which took place in Munich, Germany. CLEO®/Europe-EQEC 2023 are Europe’s largest conferences on photonics, laser technology, and related research fields. The conference program featured plenary and keynote lectures, tutorials, talks, and poster sessions. We also visited the huge exhibition LASER World of PHOTONICS to see the latest trends and innovations in photonics industry.

Elizaveta delivered a talk titled “Generation of Tunable Narrowband Azimuthally Polarized Pulses for Magnetic Excitation of Eu3+ Ions” in the session “Ultrafast Spectroscopy”. She described a developed experimental setup for generation of narrowband spectrally tunable ultrafast pulses with azimuthal polarization.

Elizaveta presenting her talk at the CLEO Europe 2023

Lorenz presented a poster “Particle-in-Cell simulations of ultrashort optical laser pulses for magnetic field enhancement and electric field suppression” with his investigations of metallic apertures of various shapes and their role in the magnetic field enhancement.

f.l.t.r.: Rodrigo Martín-Hernández from University of Salamanca, Lorenz presenting his poster, Elizaveta

We enjoyed the diverse scientific program, social dinner, networking, meeting our collaborators, as well as Munich sightseeing and cultural events.

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iStOMPS at Conferences

ICQC 2023

From 26.06.2023 to 1.07.2023, Rahul visited the 17th International Congress of Quantum Chemistry, held in Bratislava, Slovakia. The International Congress of Quantum Chemistry (ICQC) is held triennially under the patronage of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. The scientific program was composed of invited plenary lectures, selected invited contributions and presentations, and discussions in two poster sessions. During the conference, Rahul presented his poster, “Efficient and accurate relativistic ab-initio calculations of electric and magnetic dipole transitions in Eu3+ complexes

In the poster, Rahul introduced two approaches for choosing spin-free states from a CASSCF calculation for subsequent CASPT2 analysis. The initial approach, named “Tree-SOCI,” involves the selection of states according to spin-orbit coupling selection rules for atoms, whereas the second approach, called “Sel-SOCI,” focuses on selecting states based on their relative coupling strengths with a set of states of interest, similar to other selected CI approaches.

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iStOMPS at Conferences

OpenMolcas Workshop 2023

From 14 – 16 June 2023, Rahul visited the “11th edition of the OpenMolcas developers’ workshop” which took place in Bologna, Italy. In the workshop, he presented a poster, “Low budget, high accuracy computation of energy levels for Eu3+ ion”. In the poster, he presented a methodology to obtain cheap and accurate energies of a Europium(III) ion. The new methodology is based on first performing a cheap CASSCF calculation to obtain a spin-orbit Hamiltonian of a large number of spin-free states. This is used to select those spin-free states that couple with the states of interest based on their coupling strengths. In a second step, the more expensive CASPT2 treatment is only applied to the selected states.

Along with the diverse scientific program, the interesting talks and the beautiful city of Bologna, he enjoyed the workshop a lot.