Peer-reviewed research
Publication.
Quantitative research carried through to publication, in nuclear fusion simulation. It is the oldest thing on this site and, for a certain kind of team, the most relevant.
Citation
Apostolova T., Detistov P., Ivanov M. V., Orieult Y., Perlado J. M., Rivera A. — Simulation of ultra-intense laser irradiation induced high electronic excitation of bandgap materials
Nuclear Theory, Vol. 33, pp. 215–225 (2014) — Heron Press, Sofia. ISSN 1313-2822. Proceedings of the 33rd International Workshop on Nuclear Theory, Rila mountains, Bulgaria.
Authorship
Fourth author of six, on behalf of the Instituto de Fusión Nuclear, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid — alongside J. M. Perlado and A. Rivera. The first three authors are from the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
Origin
My MSc thesis at UPM, on inertial confinement fusion — the reason the Madrid degree is on the journey page.
Length
Eleven pages, 215 to 225. A contribution, not a one-page abstract.
The work itself
A quantum-kinetic approach to the strong electronic excitation of fused silica under intense, short-pulse laser irradiation. The question is what happens in the first instants after the pulse arrives: how the electron population is driven far out of equilibrium, and what that does to the material.
The contribution studies the effect of impact ionisation on the electron density and on the mean kinetic energy of the electron system, then follows electron–phonon coupling through to the rise in lattice temperature — the point at which an electronic phenomenon becomes a thermal, and eventually structural, one.
The numerical work was a solution of the Boltzmann equation, implemented in Fortran under Linux. Some habits are older than the job title.
Why it is on an engineering site
Because it is the concrete trace of a foundation that does not show up in a technology list: a double bachelor's degree in fundamental physics and theoretical mathematics, then a research question taken all the way from physical model to numerical solution to peer-reviewed publication.
It is the reason a model is never a black box, the reason a quantisation trade-off or a distributed-systems failure mode is something to reason about rather than to look up — and, for research institutions and scientific engineering teams, the part of this profile that cannot be acquired quickly.