FELs of Europe Award recognises our researcher Jérémy Rouxel

FELs of Europe is a collaboration of all free electron laser (FEL) facilities in Europe, with the goal to meet the technological and scientific challenges of these novel and rapidly developing technologies. It also provides a worldwide unique, pan-European research infrastructure that enables exploiting the full scientific potential of these unique accelerator based short-pulse light sources.

The FELs of Europe Award 2022 in “Development or innovative use of advanced instrumentation in the field of FELs” for young researchers has been awarded to Jérémy Rouxel, from the Laboratoire Hubert Curien.

The prize recognises Jeremy’s “outstanding achievements in non-linear X-ray science, and in particular the demonstration of ultrafast hard X-ray transient grating spectroscopy “. This work, carried out with the SwissFEL free electron laser, is the result of a collaboration between the Laboratoire Hubert Curien's Laser-Matter Interaction team, the Paul Scherrer Institute’s teams (Cris Svetina, Bernina experimental station’s team and the LMN team) and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s LSU team (Majed Chergui).

The technique uses an X-ray pump beam that generates a transient grating of excitation in matter which is then probed by diffracting an optical laser pulse from it. The implementation of this technique in the field of X-rays makes it possible to probe the transport of photoexcited electrons at nanometric scales and ultrashort durations.

The Prize Ceremony took place on 1st April 2022, closing the 14th International Conference on Synchrotron Radiation Instrumentation conference..