Welcome to THRILL’s first newsletter!
#1 – SPRING 2025
January 1, 2023 marked the official start of THRILL, a European research project funded by the European Union’s Horizon programme aiming to provide new schemes and devices for pushing forward the limits of research infrastructures of European relevance and ESFRI landmarks.
Today, I am thrilled to present the first newsletter of the THRILL project, highlighting our many accomplishments over the past months.
Enjoy reading!
Vincent Bagnoud, Project coordinator
A look back
Now, after the first half of the project is passed, it’s time to look back on our achievements and highlights. As we have entered the third year of our project, we can report some great results, from promising tests and experiments to three publications and a successful summer school in October 2024. All work packages are fully operational and making valuable contributions towards the objectives of the project.
2024 THRILL Summer School
30 students from eight European countries have participated in the first summer school organised by the THRILL Project, held from 7-11 October in the south of France.
Advancing Adaptive Optics: Highlights from the THRILL Workshop at Oxford
Laserlab-Europe talk “From Telescopes to Fusion Powerplants: Real-Time Adaptive Optics for High-Power Lasers”
Report on the characterization of ATON laser amplifier published
Kick-off: Workshop on task “Machine Learning” held in Dresden
9
Partners
5
Countries
4
Years
10.4M
Budget
Within THRILL, a team of developers is working on OPOSSUM. Its objective is the development of a common software platform for simulating various aspects of optical systems in a holistic approach. It should be particularly useful for simulating and designing large-size, high-energy / intensity laser systems.
OPOSSUM v0.6.0
Over the past five releases, we have developed numerous concepts and features, enabling OPOSSUM to simulate real-life optical models. However, the software currently functions more like an optics library as it lacks a full user interface. If you’re willing to test it, we’d greatly appreciate your feedback. Feel free to report bugs and submit feature requests to our software repository.
Online Workshop: 4 June 2025
The first online workshop on OPOSSUM will take place on Wednesday, 4 June 2025, from 2-4 pm CEST via Zoom. The workshop will showcase its core concept, demonstrate initial capabilities, and open discussions on future features. Researchers, engineers, and developers in optics and photonics are encouraged to participate and contribute to the future of open-source optical simulation.
#WomeninScience
With our series #WomeninScience, we portrait the female scientific staff working on THRILL. They tell us about their roles in the project, what inspires them about their work and their experiences as a woman in science.
Meet Marie Froidevaux, Senior R&D researcher, CNRS
Meet Zsuzsanna Major, staff scientist, GSI
Publications
Ohland, J.B., Lebas, N., Deo, V., Guyon, O., Mathieu, F., Audebert, P., Papadopoulos, D. (2024). Apollon Real-Time Adaptive Optics (ARTAO) – Astronomy-Inspired Wavefront Stabilization in Ultraintense Lasers. High Power Laser Science and Engineering, 2025:1-15. doi:10.1017/hpl.2025.16
Major, Zs., Eisenbarth, U., Zielbauer, B., Brabetz, C., Ohland, J.B., Zobus, Y., Roeder, S., Reemts, D., Kunzer, S., Götte, S., Neidherr, D., Hornung, J., Kewes, P., Schumacher, D., Beck, D., Hesselbach, P. (2024). High-energy laser facility PHELIX at GSI: latest advances and extended capabilities. High Power Laser Science and Engineering, 12:e39. doi:10.1017/hpl.2024.17
Ohland, J.B., Posor, D., Eisenbarth, U., Iancu, V., Ungureanu, R., Ursescu, D., & Bagnoud, V. (2023). Zernike-coefficient extraction via helical beam reconstruction for optimization (ZEHBRO) in the far field. High Power Laser Science and Engineering, 11, E86. doi:10.1017/hpl.2023.63
A full list of THRILL’s publications, presentations, and posters can be found on the publication’s page.
Consortium
Our project consortium is composed of nine partners from five countries, plus ESRF as observer.
