HASTUR Project
Harnessing Atmospheric Lasing: Towards Ultrasensitive Detection of Toxic Agents and Pathogens
ETSII-UPM. Instituto de Fusión Nuclear Guillermo Velarde
This is a project for my PhD Thesis during the academic years 2024/2027 at the Polytechnic University of Madrid.
The main goal of this Thesis is to study the detection of toxic agents and pathogens in the upper atmosphere layers by exploting the presence of molecular nitrogen. This nitrogen molecules can act as what is called an active media which essentially amplifies radiation of a specific frequency when it interacts with nitrogen, generating a laser emission. The interaction between laser light and surrounding matter in the atmosphere can be used to determine the hidden presence of undesired contaminants and to study its physical properties.
¿What are the different activities or tasks carried in this project?
- Developing Maxwell-Bloch numerical codes, as well as studying the propagation of intense infrared plasma lasers through plasma channels —with Particle-in-Cell codes (PIC)— and atomic processes in plasmas
- Developing preprocessing and postprocessing tools to study the data generated by the previous numerical codes
- Using the previous numerical codes to study the amplification of ultraviolet radiation (UV) in nitrogen plasma filaments