🚀Plasma Science Summer School!🌊 Join us on Porquerolles Island, France (June 21-27) to study: 🔹 Laser-plasma accelerators 🔹 Photon sources 🔹 Inertial fusion 🔹 Lab-Astrophysics 🎓 For PhDs & Early Career Researchers. 💰 All local costs covered! ⏳ Apply by March 27: plasmascience.fr/plasmascienc...

Kudos to our our colleague Adrien Leblanc who is a partner in the recently awarded ERC Synergy grant NP-QED ! Together with scientists from @cea.fr ,DESY and @urochester.bsky.social, he will develop experiments that turn vacuum itself into a nonlinear medium. loa.ensta-paris.fr/2025/11/12/a...

Looking for an M2 internship? Most of our offers are on our website here: loa.ensta-paris.fr/join-us/ Lots of experiments on some of the planet's coolest lasers, and lots of numerical simulations!

La fête de la science commence à l'Ecole @polytechniqueparis.bsky.social et continue demain. Venez demain le 04/10 visiter au LOA un laboratoire où nous accelerons des électrons par laser à >99,99% de la vitesse de la lumière, et où nous développons des applications médicales. A demain ! #fds2025

Boosting the energy and beam quality of laser-wakefield accelerated electrons with a plasma waveguide, first demonstrated at LOA in 2022 (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) has also worked at the APOLLON laser. We generated quasi-monoenergetic beams beyond 2 GeV ! loa.ensta-paris.fr/2025/09/30/q...

Every couple of years we move the whole lab for a few days away from the daily grind in Palaiseau to some beautiful location. For the LOA Days 2025, we went to the magnificent island of Porquerolles! loa.ensta-paris.fr/2025/09/30/t...

High-order harmonics are non-classcial! This has recently been further substantiated by @kittenstate.bsky.social and his colleagues of the QUANTUM group at LOA. loa.ensta-paris.fr/2025/09/09/q... Their observation of a displaced squeezed state is now published in @physrevresearch.bsky.social.

Antoine Cavagna is defending his PhD thesis today at LOA!

Le LOA recrute un.e assistant.e en gestion financière et comptable, en mobilité interne du service publique (NOEMI). La date limite et déjà le 30 Mai, donc merci de faire suivre cette annonce à des personnes qui pourraient être intéressés! emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/MOBIN...

@univparissaclay.bsky.social @ip-paris.bsky.social Join us at the FOrum de la Communauté Ultrarapide du plateau de Saclay on June 12 at Polytechnique @ecolepolytechnique.bsky.social! Register at focus.sciencesconf.org before June 1st! See you at FOCUS#4 for this great program:

Juliette Dubois is defending her PhD thesis today!

There's a new animal in the zoo of ultrafast pulse characterization methods: TIBETAN-FOX is a specialist of femtosecond XUV pulses, and has been demonstrated first at LOA! loa.ensta-paris.fr/2025/04/29/t...

Are you working on scientific subjects dealing with ultrafast (or almost so) dynamics and are located on the Paris-Saclay plateau (@ip-paris.bsky.social[email protected])? Then join us at FOCUS on June 12th 2025 at @ecolepolytechnique.bsky.social ! focus.sciencesconf.org?lang=en

Amélie Kies du LOA a remporté le 1er Prix du jury au finale de "Ma Thèse en 180 secondes" du IP-Paris @ip-paris.bsky.social ! Tout le LOA est fier de notre collègue Amélie, bravo ! 🥳✌️💖 @mt180fr.bsky.social #MT180 www.ip-paris.fr/actualites/r...

Here we go! #MT180s

Go Amélie !

Notre doctorante Amélie Kies, qui participe au concours #MT180s au @ipparis.bsky.social, raconte dans cette interview son parcours qui l'a amené à faire une thèse en physique quantique chez nous. www.ensta-paris.fr/fr/amelie-ki...

Bienvenu au GDR Ultrafast Phenomena @gdr-up.bsky.social sur Bluesky !

Our recent paper in @opticapubsgroup.bsky.social Optics Letters presents the first relativistic plasma-mirror high harmonic generation on a liquid-sheet target. This is a real game changer for plasma mirrors ! Persistent kHz-rep.-rate with unprecedented stability. doi.org/10.1364/OL.5...

Bravo encore à notre collègue Aline Vernier, décorée cette année par la médaille de cristal du CNRS ! Voici sa vidéo portrait tournée pour l'occasion: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlmO...

We were happy to receive Prof. Donna Strickland's visit today and show her around a few of our labs. Absolutely everything at LOA runs thanks to her (and our former colleague Gerard Mourou's) Nobel-prize-decorated Chirped-pulse-amplification!

Join the CNRS - one of the finest research institutions of the planet, and one of the possibilities to work at LOA.

In this year's CNRS "concours" for permanent researcher positions, there's one specifically for laser-plasma particle acceleration at LOA. The application deadline is 8 Jan.; it's strongly advised to contact the lab before applying. Join us! (Cf. France's Official Journal, under N°04/02:)

IMPALA, the method retrieving multi-spectral wavefronts from measured speckle patterns, co-developed and first demonstrated at LOA, is highlighted in the December issue of @opnmagazine.bsky.social: www.optica-opn.org/home/article...

This wonderful Macaron has been home-baked and laser engraved with an LOA logo by one of our brilliant PhD candidates. This is the kind of rich skill set you develop during a thesis at LOA! It tastes really good, too.

Today at LOA, Yuliia Mankovska defends her PhD thesis "High-precision probing of Laser-Plasma and electron beam-plasma interactions".

The snow has stayed over night!

❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️ LOA got covered in snow today! ❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️

Hydrogen-gas improves the performance of a laser-plasma accelerator: we now have, at 1-kHz rep.-rate, a quasi-monoenergetic electron beam reaching up to 10 MeV, with a 15-mrad divergence and 2 pC of charge per pulse! loa.ensta-paris.fr/2024/11/19/h... Published in: doi.org/10.1103/Phys...

LOA's QUANTUM group, with @kittenstate.bsky.social as lead author, have ou published a Phy.Rev.X Quantum-paper, proving high-harmonic-generatio to produce non-classical light states. loa.ensta-paris.fr/2024/11/12/e... doi.org/10.1103/PRXQ...

Lors de la fête de la science à l'Ecole Polytechnique samedi 05 octobre, vous pouvez venir visiter le LOA! Vous verrez comment nous contrôlons la lumière laser pour la concentrer dans l'espace et le temps et agir avec des forces colossales sur la matière.

This year's IP-Paris Research Day on the theme "Science Shining Light" featured 3 presentations by LOA researchers, and had old-LOA-friend and Nobel Laureate Pierre Agostini as a special guest. We enjoyed the day a lot! youtu.be/3C8H_MV5C6Q?...

LOA has created a new research group, called QUANTUM ! Check them out here: loa.ensta-paris.fr/research/ult...

LOA has a new doctor: Dr. Silin Fu has just defended his thesis!

Together with their collaborators of Université de Génève, LOA's F6ilm GROUP now hold a Guinness World Record: the first successful use of a laser to divert the path of a lightning strike, which took place on 24 July 2021 on the peak of Mount Säntis. www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-record...

Lucas Rovige has been awarded the 2024 PhD research award by the Plasma Physics Division of the European Physical Society (EPS) for his thesis “Optimization, stabilization and optical phase control of a high-repetition rate laser-wakefield accelerator”. Bravo! loa.ensta-paris.fr/2024/09/03/2...

In a new paper in Appl. Phys. Lett., we show how laser-filaments can be extended by a specially designed multifocal phase mask, and guide electric discharges over 2-3 times longer distances. loa.ensta-paris.fr/2024/09/03/e... doi.org/10.1063/5.02...

We made the crucial step from merely observing the effects of the ultra-intense laser waveforms on their interaction with plasma mirrors to actually *controlling* them: "Lightwave-controlled relativistic plasma mirrors", out in Opt. Lett.: doi.org/10.1364/OL.5... loa.ensta-paris.fr/2024/09/03/l...

Finally, the pre-print about our now >3-year old results on CEP-control of relativistic plasma mirrors is on arXiv. This has been a real milestone: it's the important step from observation to *control* of the attosecond collective electron dynamics. arxiv.org/abs/2406.06396

We have an open permanent research engineer position at LOA in the Filamentation and Laser-Matter Interaction group. Join us!

Pablo San-Miguel-Claveria receives the René Pellat thesis prize of the French Physical Society's (SFP) plasma division. Congratulations Pablo!

Together with my friends and colleagues of LIDYL at CEA Saclay, I wrote a little history of the discoveries of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics for attosecond pulses. It's out now in the journal Photoniques: doi.org/10.1051/phot...

We've written up all technical detail about our relativistic laser-plasma interaction setup at LOA, with simultaneous XUV light, electron and ion detectors. It is finannly out in Rev.Sci.Instr. : doi.org/10.1063/5.01...

The LOA has played a major role in the development of extremely short attosecond flashes of light. These can now be used to "see" the movement of electrons. Check out the details of the ongoing reasearch on this topic at Institut Polytechnique de Paris:

Photoshoot with the PCO group in Salle Noire 2.0

LOA welcomes 9 new researchers this academic year:

Follow Adeline on a quick tour of the LOA: