Luis OS visited Prof. Tünde Fülop and Prof. Mattias Marklund at the Department of Physics at Chalmers University on 12th and 13th of September 2016 for discussions and collaboration on plasma-based accelerators, QED and relativistic astrophysics. He also delivered a seminar to the Department. On the photo, Luis OS with the hosts and with Prof. Chan Joshi, also visiting at the time.

Ricardo F has just been promoted to Full Professor of Physics, after winning a recent call for this position at ISCTE-IUL. Many congratulations to Ricardo on this very well deserved promotion!

Jorge V was awarded a prestigious Honorable Mention in the ULisboa Science Prizes 2016. The University of Lisbon Science Prizes are open to professors, researchers and post-doctoral scholarship holders that have been with the University of Lisbon for at least two years and aims to promote publications in high impact journals.

The prizes were awarded during the celebration of the third anniversary of the ULisboa, on the 25th of July at 17pm.

Diana A was awarded the best student poster prize at the Advanced Accelerator Concepts Workshop 2016 in National Harbor, Maryland for her work on “Transverse evolution of e+ beams accelerating in hollow plasma channel non-linear wakefield”. Many congratulations to Diana!

Another meeting (Advanced Accelerators Concept Workshop 2016) with a strong presence of GoLP members with Timon M, Diana A, Joana M, Ujjwal S, Ricardo F, and Nelson L, presenting several talks and posters, and with Ricardo delivering one of the plenary talks.

On July 29 2016, Luis OS was distinguished as Grande Oficial of the Ordem da Instrução Pública by the President of the Portuguese Republic. Video of the ceremony is here.

GoLP was heavily represented at the EPS Plasma Physics Conference 2016 in Leuven, for several talks and posters delivered by Ricardo F, Marta F, Thomas G, Garreth W, Joana M, Marija V, Ujjwal S, Nitin S, and Anton H with an invited talk by Marija Vranic.

On July 4 Luis OS attended an ERC PI centric event hosted by the Agency managing the ERC programme at the Champalimaud Foundation. The event was also attended by Commissioner Carlos Moedas and the President of the European Research Council Jean-Pierre Bourguignon. 

The Summer School in Advanced Scientific Computing took place at Minho University, Braga, from the 20th to the 23rd of June, attended by over 60 students and researchers from all over Europe including GoLP team members Paulo Ratinho, Nitin Shukla and Pedro Carneiro.

Organized by the Texas Institute of Advanced Scientific computing (TACC) and Universidade do Minho, the event included topics in parallel programming and code optimization, data visualization, and a presentation by Intel of the recently launched “Knights Landing” Xeon Phi processor family.

This was also a great opportunity to get up to date with the latest trends in high performance scientific computing within the beautiful scenery of the Gerês mountains that surrounds Braga!

From 14-17 of June, Afonso Mota, a 16 year old, 10th grade student from Valsassina School, will be staying at GoLP for an internship as part of the project “my first work experience”.

Afonso is interested in Astrophysics and gravitation. Despite his young age, he will be learning the basics of Mathematica and Matlab programming languages and applying them to understand the orbits of the planets in the solar system and the periodicity of the tides on earth. Besides his work, he will have the opportunity to interact with all the members at GoLP to learn about the exciting research that is being performed.

Welcome Afonso!

The editorial board of JPP is holding a meeting in Lisbon to discuss the exciting recent developments in Plasma Physics and the future directions for the Journal of Plasma Physics (Peter Catto, Per Helander, Thierry Passot, Neil Hammond, Bill Dorland, Alex Schekochihin, Troy Carter, Dmitri Uzdensky, Jon Arons, Beth Woodhouse, Cary Forest, and Luis OS.

On May 23 2016, and on the celebration of the 105 years of IST, the President of the Portuguese Republic, Prof. Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa (in the picture), announced that he will award Luis OS the title of “Grande Oficial” of the “Ordem da Instrução Pública”. This distinction is among the highest recognitions that can be bestowed to portuguese citizens or organizations by the President (IST News here in Portuguese only)

In the new institutional video of IST Luis OS has a cameo role presenting some of the Jorge V’s work on the generation of intense B-fields in underdense laser-plasma interactions, which was recently published in Nature Physics.

The Laboratory for Intense Lasers has been recently featured in the cartoons of Mathieu Sapin for the Spirou magazine. In this special issue dedicated to science (October 2015), Marta Fajardo and Celso João showed Mathieu Sapin how the most powerful laser in Portugal works. Mathieu Sapin also learnerd that the “Holy Grail” of lasers is not to develop a Jedi light sabre (Image from the SPIROU magazine. www.spirou.com © Dupuis 2015).

Luis OS, Thomas G, and Kevin S are attending the HEDLA 2016 conference at SLAC/Stanford, where they will present some of our exciting work on these topics (Thomas G will deliver an invited talk and Kevin a contributed talk, with more 5 posters with our team’s work). They will also catch up with our illustrious alumni Fiuza and Paulo now at SLAC/Stanford.

Today was another great GoLP Day organized by our group members Gareth Williams, Elisabetta Boella and Ana Luisa. Besides the classic “Marshmallow Challenge” there was also the opportunity to avoid a nuclear meltdown with many more moments of interaction and fun in Mouraria and all around Lisbon.

Our team has been awarded a second Advanced Grant from the European Research Council in the most recent call. Luis O. Silva was first awarded an Advanced Grant in 2010. This is the first time a researcher working in Portugal in Physical Sciences and Engineering (one of the three major areas of the ERC) has been awarded twice with an Advanced Grant. Luis O. Silva is also the youngest scientist in Europe in Exact Sciences to be awarded twice with an Advanced Grant (data from 2015).

According to the European Research Council, the “ERC Advanced Grants are designed to allow outstanding research leaders of any nationality and any age to pursue ground-breaking, high-risk projects in Europe.”

The project, called InPairs, aims to study how intense electromagnetic fields, such as lasers, can be converted into matter and anti-matter, a direct illustration of Einstein’s E = mc2. Using the fastest supercomputers…

The PRACE project “Pair-dominated plasmas in ultra intense fields: from the laboratory to extreme astrophysical conditions” has been featured in the website of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing, with a description of the key results of the project. This PRACE project has contributed to the goals of the starting FCT grant and the ERC Advanced Grant Accelerates. The article is available here.

A preparation meeting for the AWAKE experiment will be held from March 9 to March 11at IST, hosted by Jorge Vieira and Nelson Lopes. The goal of AWAKE is to use proton bunches from the Super Proton Synchrotron (the last ring before protons are injected into the LHC) at CERN as a driver for plasma waves capable of accelerating electrons to high energies in a short distance. The experiment is currently under preparation, and this meeting will be on the latest status of the experimental campaign. The detailed agenda is here <https://indico.cern.ch/event/484032/timetable/>. The meeting will be held at the IST meeting room in the Central Building. On Friday afternoon, Prof. Allen Caldwell will deliver the GoLP VIP Seminar.

A new paper in Nature Communications by Jorge Vieira et al. in the January 2016 issue demonstrates how to amplify optical tornados to unprecedented intensities. The paper generalizes the concept of Raman amplification to laser pulses with orbital angular momentum.

Optical tornados have applications in compact accelerators and brilliant x-ray sources, faster optical communication devices, and optical computing.

Research led by a team at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, found an novel way of creating intense optical tornados, unusual forms of laser light beams that spin during propagation. This discovery was published on January 28th in the journal Nature Communications.

Optical tornadoes, i.e. laser beams with a vortex structure, may revolutionise our understanding of how matter behaves under extreme and so far unexplored conditions. At ultrahigh intensities, however, their production in the laboratory remains a challenge. The published paper proposes…