Galatea Lab News

Stress vortex pattern in glass due to the presence of laser-induced modification.

In an effort led by Dr. Seonwoo Lee at the Galatea Lab, our team demonsrated the use of wide-field second harmonic imaging as a non-desctructive method to observe femtosecond laser-induced nanocrystallization in Tellurite glass provided by our collaborator, Prof. Tetsuo Kishi at the Institute of Science Tokyo (formerly Tokyo Tech). In particular, we were able to retrieve in a non-desctructive manner, informations such as nanocrystals distribution and their chirality. The results has just been reported in ACS Nano.

Best EDAM doctoral program poster award 2024 and STI Teaching Assistant award for Antoine Duret

Antoine Duret, PhD student at the Galatea Lab, receives the best power award for the doctoral school EDAM day 2024. He also received a few days before, a STI Teaching Assistant Award for his strong involvement in assisting professors in their lectures. Congrats Antoine!

Our study, part of Gözen Torun’s thesis, on how to turn a tellurite glass into a photoconductive device has been reported in Physical Review Applied. This work received quite some attention in the media, in addition to EPFL Press Release on the topic. Here are few of this related stories: IEEE Spectrum, Physics.org, LaserFocusWorld.

A cross-disciplinary project involving three EPFL units – the Hub for Advanced Image Reconstruction, the School of Engineering’s Galatea Lab, and the AudioVisual Communications Laboratory (LCAV) – has received a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) to study methods for speeding image capture in non-linear optical microscopy. Their work will be used to examine nanostructures in transparent materials.

February 2023, Gözden Torun, Tetsuo Kishi, Diego Pugliese, Daniel Milanese, Yves Bellouard. Our research discuss the formation of elemental trigonal Te on tellurite glass surfaces exposed to femtosecond laser pulses and shows the potential to fabricate functional transparent electronic micro/nanodevices, published in Advanced Materials


On February, Mr Ernesto GRIBAUDO, PhD at the Galatea Lab, won the first prize of the best student presentation award in the LASE conference on Frontiers in Ultrafast Optics for his paper “Optimization and characterization of near-field enhancement generated nanogrooves” at SPIE Photonics West 2023 conference in San Francisco.

Mr Pieter Vlugter, PhD at the Galatea Lab in Microcity Neuchâtel, won the EDAM Doctoral Thesis Distinction 2022 for his thesis “Investigation of femtosecond laser-tuned thermomechanical properties of fused silica” (2023)

On November 19 and 20, the Galatea Laboratory participated to the Scientastic festival, which attracted a record number of visitors (more than 14’000)! During this event, children, parents and participant of all ages could learn more about their fundamental importance  of light in research, in our everyday life and in tomorrow’s world and discover the science and technology related to light at the heart of EPFL Campus.  As part of the labs exhibitor space, our lab presented an interactive laser-matter experiment, allowing children and the public to ‘feel the force’ of light as it was processing a material.

 

Professor Yves Bellouard, head of the Galatea Laboratory at EPFL’s School of Engineering, has been elected a Fellow Member of the Optical Society (Optica) at the Society’s recent Board of Directors meeting.

October 2022: Arunkrishnan Radhakrishnan successfully defended his thesis. His study was on “Effect of femtosecond laser-induced high pressure on fused silica polymorphism “.

April 2022: Enrico Casamenti successfully defended his thesis. His study was on “Investigation of femtosecond laser-enabled 3D micro-infiltration processes”.

April 2022 – The class, which is part of the Master of Science in Microengineering program, lets students experience the design process from start to finish.

April 2022 – New technique can create complex 3D optics for infrared spectroscopy, sensing and more. Published on www.optica.org

April 2022 – G. Torun, A. Yadav, K.A. Richardson and Y. Bellouard: This study specifically investigates the case of chalcogenide glass (Ge23Sb7S70) exposed to femtosecond laser pulses, inducing pulso-to-pulso nanostructure formation that is correlated to the glass network structural evolution using Raman spectroscopy as well as morphological and elemental microscopy analysis, published in Frontiers in Physics.

April 2022 – Enricoo Casamenti, Gözden Torun, Luciano Borasi, Maxime Lautenbacher, Mathieu Bertrand, Jérôme Faist, Andreas Mortensen and Yves Bellouard: “This work presents a micro-infiltration approach that enables the integration of artibrarily shaped infrared glass components inside fused silica. The resulting silica-chalcogenide composites can find application in a wide range of broadband photonics fields”, published in Optics Express

Saood Ibni Nazir; Christos E. Athanasiou; Yves Bellouard: This work investigates the behavior of fused silica beams subjected to high uniaxial stress at room temperature. Using a monolithic tensile tester device fabricated using direct laser writing, we show that stress levels up to 1 GPa are stable in magnitude for a measurement duration exceeding a year. For higher stresses and measured up to 2GPa, we report an initial relaxation while maintaining the structural integrity of the loaded beams. We further show that through high-temperature annealing, such relaxation can be efficiently supressed, published in the Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids: X