Another New Quasar! - Lina Hoummi
Another of the Quasar groups’ new PhD students starting this year is Lina Hoummi. Lina’s higher education began in the form of typical French preparatory classes, at the Lycée Louis le Grand in Paris. They replace usual undergraduate studies at a university by two or three years intensive courses in Mathematics and Physics. She then passed a national competitive exam to join on the Grandes Écoles, the Engineering School l’Institut d’Optique Graduate School (https://www.institutoptique.fr/en), from which she graduated in September this year. To maintain her strong mathematical skills, she gave weekly two hours oral interrogations in her former preparatory class, for two years. This year, she also obtained a Master’s degree from the University of Paris-Saclay (France), entitled Laser, Optic, Matter, as a third year specialisation within the Engineering school.
Her Master’s thesis summed up her apprenticeship at the III-V Lab, a joint laboratory between Thales and former Alcatel-Lucent, now Nokia. Part of the Bell Laboratories France, she studied hybrid III-V lasers on silicon, for telecommunication networks. From characterisation to simulation, she worked on the optimisation of the silicon cavity, mainly composed of directional couplers, to make it more robust to fabrication hazards.
Her PhD is shared between the SOLEIL synchrotron and the University of Liverpool, at the Cockcroft Institute. She will spend her first and fourth years with us, but study at the SOLEIL synchrotron in between. Her project deals with the upgrade of SOLEIL storage ring: this project is part of the worldwide wish to create a new generation of synchrotron’s DLSRs (Diffraction Limited Storage Rings) by reducing their critical parameter, , the emittance, by an order of magnitude. In this perspective, Lina recently attended the LER (Low Emittance Ring) 2016 workshop at SOLEIL, where she met many top researchers in the area and learnt a great deal from the entire experience.