Mission

At GoLP, we are committed to continuously “raising the bar” and to pursue GoLP’s mission.

GoLP mission statement

The activities of GoLP are focused on research and advanced training in Plasma Physics, Advanced Photonics and Advanced Computing, through (i) research in frontier questions, grounded on a culture of entrepreneurship, creativity, and international collaboration, (ii) the outstanding quality of our members, and (iii) the commitment to the scientific and technological development of Portugal and Europe. Our aim is to be recognized as one of the best research groups in our field through the reputation of our researchers, the quality of our students, and the successes of our alumni.

In our vision, GoLP (i) assumes a leading role in our fields, (ii) is a central hub for new ideas/approaches, exciting discoveries/developments; (iii) is a magnet for outstanding students, post-docs and researchers; (iv) provides an exciting research environment similar to the best; (v) sustains its scientific breakthroughs through a unique interplay between theory, simulation and experiments.

GoLP is committed to continuously “raising the bar”.

GoLP’s research weaves together our two strongest suits – massively parallel simulations and intense lasers. It is focused on a few of the most challenging questions in our field, as identified in surveys and prospective studies conducted, for instance, by the National Academy of Sciences USA (e.g. Intense Ultrafast Lasers 2018, Plasma Science 2020). The overarching questions that we aim to address are:

How does matter behave in extreme electromagnetic fields, at ultra-relativistic intensities, ultra-short timescales, exotic and structured fields or at extremely short wavelengths?
Can one use plasma acceleration and other plasma-based techniques to develop compact accelerators for use at the energy frontier, in medicine, in probing materials, and in novel light sources for bioimaging?
What are the plasma mechanisms, including those coupled with QED processes, relevant in extreme astrophysical environments, such as compact objects or in relativistic shocks, and what can we learn about these exotic cosmic accelerators in a laboratory experiment with lasers and intense particle beams?
How can the combination of high-performance computing and machine learning, supplemented by theory and experiments, uncover the nonlinear physics regimes of extreme plasma scenarios?
What are the enabling technologies to construct new generation laser systems delivering high peak and average power pulses?

Find out about how we are addressing these questions in our Research Teams webpage and the webpages of the different teams.