Lasers4EU

Lasers4EU Webinar: Technology transfer and patenting: from fundamental research to a business model. The example of LaserLeap Technologies, 26 March 2025
2025-03-26 17:00 - 18:00 (Europe/Berlin)
Speaker: Carlos Serpa (University of Coimbra & LaserLeap)

This webinar will explore the journey from fundamental research to a viable business model within a technology-based university spin-off. Using the case of LaserLeap Technologies – a medical and aesthetic device company founded in 2011 by a professor, a researcher and a doctoral student – we will examine key aspects of technology transfer, development, financing and intellectual property. Rather than simply showcasing successes we will highlight the challenges faced, including technical, economic and regulatory barriers and how the company adapted its business model over time.Ultimately the webinar will emphasize the dynamic process of bridging the gap between academic innovation and the business world.

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Laserlab-Europe Talk: Revealing bacterial subcellular structure with three-dimensional multicolour super-resolution microscopy, 5 March 2025
2025-03-05 16:00 - 17:00
Speaker: Chiara Caldini (LENS)
Cellular compartmentalization is the separation of the cellular interior into distinct compartments, each with specific conditions and materials, that enable the simultaneous execution of different metabolic processes. This organization is essential for regulating cellular functions, as it enhances efficiency by minimizing the loss of intermediate products. While the compartmentalization of eukaryotic cells is well understood, much less is known about the prokaryotic one. For a long time, prokaryotic cells, such as bacteria, were believed to lack subcellular organization, with biochemical reactions occurring in a disordered manner. However, recent studies on metabolic pathways suggest a certain degree of subcellular organization within bacteria too that would facilitate enzyme proximity to enhance reactions kinetics. Although molecular biology provides different techniques, such as two-hybrid systems, to analyse molecular interactions, imaging approaches are necessary to provide nanoscale spatial information about those interactions.
In our work we demonstrate how by combining Photo-Activated Localization Microscopy (PALM) with Expansion Microscopy (ExM) it is possible to perform three-dimensional simultaneous single-molecule co-localization and measure intermolecular distances with nanometres precision. The Ex-PALM approach is applied to study the spatial distribution of two enzymes, HisF and HisH, of the histidine metabolic pathway in Escherichia Coli bacteria whose interaction has already been demonstrated by previous studies. Using a plasmid-based transformation, each protein was tagged with a photoactivable fluorescent protein (HisF-PAGFP, HisH-PAmCherry) to enable single-molecule localization with nanometres accuracy. A negative control sample with two non-interacting enzymes, HisH and aaC, was also prepared to confirm our hypothesis that only interacting proteins co-localize.
To validate our theory, we first improved three-dimensional multicolour PALM imaging by reducing crosstalk and chromatic aberrations. This step was essential, as these aberrations are comparable in scale to the intermolecular distances of interest, and failing to correct them would compromise single-molecule localization accuracy, making it impossible to analyse densely packed subcellular structures, such as those found in bacteria. Next, we optimized the ExM protocol to achieve a 4.5-fold isotropic expansion of bacteria, enabling the study of bacterial subcellular organization. To prove the reliability of our analysis method, we applied it on both simulated and real data and found consistent results.

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Lasers4EU Activity Board meeting, 5 March 2025
2025-03-05 10:00 - 12:00
The Activity Board of the Lasers4EU project will meet on 5 March 2025, 10:00-12:00 CET.
The link to connect will be shared by the Laserlab-Europe office.

This is a project internal event.

Laserlab-Europe Talk: Laser-surface processing for green Hydrogen and energy storage applications, 29 Jan 2025
2025-01-29 16:00 - 17:00
Title: Laser-surface processing for green Hydrogen and energy storage applications
Speaker: Panagiotis A. Loukakos (IESL-FORTH)
Date: Wednesday, 29 January 2025, 16:00 CET
Venue: Online

In this talk I will present our recent work on the application of laser-surface processing in the fabrication of nanostructured metallic electrodes. These electrodes have been found to exhibit enhanced electrochemical properties and they have been used in water-splitting electrochemical cells where we have found that they produce almost 5 times as much Hydrogen when compared with flat metallic electrodes. The enhanced Hydrogen evolution reactivity and electrochemical properties are attributed to the concomitant enlargement of the electrode’s electrocatalytic area due to the nanostructured surface. The details of the experiments as well as the impact of applications of lasers in the energy and environmental sectors will be discussed.

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This Laserlab-Europe Talk is coorganised by Lasers4EU and 360Carla.

Laserlab-Europe Talk: From Telescopes to Fusion Powerplants: Real-Time Adaptive Optics for High-Power Lasers
2024-12-18 16:00 - 17:00
Title: From Telescopes to Fusion Powerplants: Real-Time Adaptive Optics for High-Power LasersSpeaker: Jonas B. Ohland (GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research)Date: Wednesday, 18 December 2024, 16:00 CET
The Apollon Real-Time Adaptive Optics (ARTAO) system addresses air turbulence-induced Strehl ratio fluctuations in Apollon, the 10 PW Ti:Sapphire laser system in France. With a 50 m multi-pass amplifier and a 140 mm beam diameter, turbulence previously caused significant beam quality instability. To resolve this, the open-source AO platform CACAO, originally developed for the Subaru Observatory, was adapted for real-time beam stabilization using a continuous pilot beam. This marks a pioneering application of astronomical AO technology in ultra-high-intensity lasers.
Supported by the EC funded THRILL project under its wavefront stabilization task, ARTAO demonstrates a stability sufficient to achieve an on-shot Strehl ratio above 0.96 by evaluating 2.6 thousand wavefronts per second and controlling a deformable mirror at 1.3 kHz.
This technology has great potential for future applications: in Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) powerplants, real-time AO will be indispensable for operating hundreds of laser beamlines at 10 Hz, delivering MJ-scale pulses with minimal aberrations. By integrating AO into Adaptive Laser Architecture (ALA), these systems can overcome thermal challenges and meet the demands of fusion energy production.
This presentation will detail ARTAO’s development, initial results, and its potential role in the future of high-energy laser systems.

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Laserlab-Europe Talk: Compressive Raman imaging: a computational framework for high-speed chemical microscopy
2024-11-20 16:00 - 17:00
Title: Compressive Raman imaging: a computational framework for high-speed chemical microscopySpeaker: Hilton B. de Aguiar (CNRS, Laboratoire Kastler Brossel and Ecole Normale Superieure)Date: Wednesday, 20 November 2024, 4:00pm CET
Raman imaging is recognized as a powerful label-free approach to provide contrasts based on chemical selectivity. Nevertheless, Raman-based microspectroscopy still have drawbacks precluding high-speed chemical imaging. The main issue is the inherent high data throughput in microspectroscopy: fast spectral imaging is challenging for dynamic and large-scale imaging due to its data acquisition, processing and representation change (from vibrational resonances amplitudes to chemicals concentration) procedures.
These challenges can be overcome by exploiting the concept of compressive Raman imaging: by leveraging the sparsity [1] and redundancy [2] in Raman data sets, one can develop computational procedures to considerably simplify and speed up the spectral image acquisition. Exploiting such framework, we have recently reached speeds compatible with video-rate imaging [3] by detecting just a handful of photons.
In this presentation, I will introduce and discuss the different ways of performing compressive Raman, in particular focusing on challenges for bio-imaging, and also show more recent results applied to long-time imaging of electrochemical systems [4].
References[1] Sturm et al, ACS Photon. 6, 1409 (2019); Scotte et al. Anal. Chem. 90, 7197 (2018).[2] Soldevila et al, Optica 6, 341 (2019).[3] Gentner et al, Opt. Lett. in print (2024).[4] Pandya et al, Nat. Comm. 15, 8362 (2024).

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Workshop on electronic laboratory notebooks
2024-11-13 09:30 - 13:00
Early and open sharing of research data is one of the key Open Science practices that still needs to be improved in our labs. Among the various enabling tools, electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs) – designed to replace commonly used paper notebooks – offer notable benefits to users, from supporting collaboration amongst researchers, simplifying secured copying of data or time stamping to directly incorporating of instrument parameters. However, there are a multitude of ELN products on the market [Nature Protocols 17, 179 (2022)] and identifying the most appropriate and user-friendly one may be complex and time-consuming.
This Laserlab-Europe online workshop will present user experience (pros and cons) on some of the most popular ELNs (e.g. eLabFTW or Labfolder) as well as national initiatives on related topics such as metadata. Discussions will allow exchanging on pros and cons of ELNs and on how to motivate ourselves to switch from paper to an ELN.
Agenda >>

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Lasers4EU Kick-off Meeting, 21-22 October 2024, Crete, Greece
2024-10-21 07:00 - 2024-10-22 16:00 | Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell Campus,, Didcot, OX11 0QX, United Kingdom
Preliminary agenda
21 October 2024
09:00-13:00 Laserlab-Europe V General Assembly
13:00-14:00 Lunch
14:00-17:30 Lasers4EU Kick-off Meeting Day 1
17:30-19:00 Lab Tour at IESL-FORTH
19:30- Working Dinner
22 October 2024
09:00-15:30 Lasers4EU Kick-off Meeting Day 2
16:00/16:30 Sightseeing Tour

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