EPP team members Marija Vranic and Oscar Amaro have recently published their work “Optimal laser focusing for positron production in laser–electron scattering”  on New Journal of Physics.

Marija and Óscar extend the analytical scaling laws previously developed for electron interaction with a plane wave to more realistic geometries, resulting in a fast parameter optimization process that can save computing resources. Their study has important applications in real-time optimization and data analysis in experiments.

The Spanish Center for Pulsed Lasers (CLPU) and the Instituto Técnico de Lisboa in collaboration with the European infrastructure ELI-ERIC, through the Impulse Project, will celebrate on 12th of November a joint event to look for synergies among the two laser infrastructures and the European consortium in order to improve high-intensity lasers science to a future for development, innovation and education in this field.

The event will be online from 9 am to 1 pm (Lisbon time) and it will start with an introduction to the laser technologies and applications in ELI, followed by two sessions on innovation and education opportunities for Portugal and Spain.

We will post soon the final program with the confirmed speakers, so stay tuned!

We cordially invite you to participate in this First Introductory ELI ERIC Iberian Information Day, so please make your registration here.

On the 21st of October, the EPP member Fábio Cruz has successfully defended his PhD thesis with the title “Multiscale modeling of pulsar magnetospheres”.

Fábio’s work was approved with the top mark of Distinction and Honors.

The defense has taken place in a hybrid mode. His thesis committee was composed by Ilidio Lopes (IST), Anatoly Spitkovsky (Princeton), Benoit Cerruti (Grenoble), and Thomas Grismayer (IST), and was presided by Luis Lemos Alves (IST).

Many Congratulations to Fábio and all the best wishes for his career and future!

Mukhtar Hussain defended successfully his PhD thesis on October 20, 2021 and passed with Distinction. He was awarded a fellowship in the APPLAuSE doctoral program on Plasma Science and Engineering in 2016 and joined GoLP for his thesis under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Marta Fajardo, and co-supervised by Dr. Gareth Williams (also IST) and Dr. Hamed Merdji (LIDYL, CEA-Saclay).During his PhD, Mukhtar used ultrashort laser pulses to investigate harmonic generation in solids. He studied the interplay between perturbative and non-perturbative effects in 2nd and 3rd harmonic generation in MgO and chromium-doped MgO, also showing that by introducing dopants into simple crystals  the electronic structure can be shaped to tailor the non-linear optical response. He also investigated the nonlinear propagation effects of the ultrafast intense near-infrared pulses in a range of wide bandgap dielectrics, mapping the crystal response by measuring the polarization and ellipticity response of the harmonics.
During his secondment at the Laboratoire d’Optique Apliquée, France, he…

EPP team members Marija Vranic and Jorge Vieira were awarded with a total of 68 million core-hours at the TIER-0 supercomputer Marenostrum, at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. The computing time was awarded by the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) during the 23rd call, and were selected amongst 61 submitted proposals. The project “Direct laser acceleration of leptons in plasma” was awarded with 36 million core-hours (PI: MV). This project will be dedicated to investigate advanced positron sources for plasma-based accelerators based on nonlinear QED processes. The project “Acceleration control and superradiance in laser-plasma accelerators” was awarded with 32 million core-hours (PI: JV). This project will be dedicated to investigate coherent x-ray emission and acceleration in laser-plasma accelerators. 

EPP member Ricardo Fonseca’s invited talk for the student organization FusionEPtalks, with the title of “The ZPIC educational code suit”, is now available on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5vMwLHdefc

ZPIC’s main goal is to assist the study and understanding of plasma physics using computer simulations.

This self-contained and fully relativistic electromagnetic code requires only a C compiler. The output files are written in a new file format called ZDF that can be easily read using the supplied routines in a number of languages, such as Python, Matlab, and IDL. If available, a Python environment can be used to control the simulations and visualize code output.

To be updated on the latest news on ZPIC follow the GitHub page:
https://github.com/ricardo-fonseca/zpic

The work “Stable positron acceleration in thin, warm, hollow plasma channels” by EPP team members Thales S and Jorge V, by EPP team alumni Diana A, and collaborators in the US (Mike Downer, Mark Hogan, Vitaly Yakimenko and Rafal Zgadzaj) was recently accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters. In this work, Thales et al. propose a novel regime for positron acceleration, which may deliver high quality positron bunches free from deleterious instabilities in experiments.

EPP team member Marija V won, as PI, a ~€250k research grant in the physics panel for the project titled “Positron sources based on ultra-intense lasers”. The grant is awarded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) on a nation-wide competitive call, where the proposal was ranked among the top 5%. The research and development funding is allocated for three years.

X-GoLP member João MD participated in a fact checking TV show last week to explain instant ice formation, a popular phenomenon in recent social media videos. In this news clip (in Portuguese), recorded in the laboratory of experimental physics at Técnico, João MD shows that this is a common and well understood phenomenon.

On June 16, the General Assembly of the Extreme Light Infrastructure European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ELI ERIC) appointed X-GoLP member Marta F as member of its International Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (ISTAC) for a period of three years. The ISTAC members appointed by the General Assembly are high-level personalities internationally recognized for their scientific and technical expertise in the scientific and technical fields relevant to ELI ERIC, and/or for their management of scientific organizations and international user research infrastructures. The criteria for selection included an interdisciplinary mix of scientific and technical experience, institutional balance, diversity of background and gender, and previous experience with ELI.

The purpose of the ISTAC of ELI ERIC is to advise the ELI ERIC General Assembly and the Director General on scientific and technical issues that bear on the quality and the full and effective utilization of ELI facilities, as well as…

At the closing session of the 47th EPS Plasma Physics Conference (fully virtual), Prof. Richard Dendy announced that Camilla W was one of the winners of the PPCF/EPS/IUPAP PhD poster prizes. She received the award for presenting her project with the title “Target Normal Sheath Acceleration with shaped lasers”.

Samuel M, epp/GoLP alumnus now at Microsoft in Seattle, was interviewed by Luis OS for a joint initiative of the MEFT coordination and NFIST, where he shared inspirational thoughts on his path from Tecnico to the world. The video of the interview is available here.

Tomorrow’s Laser-Plasma Accelerator Seminar, at GSI, will be given by EPP member Miguel P. The seminar will be on Tuesday at 1.30pm GMT (2.30am CET) via Zoom. The talk will be entitled “Radiative reflection: high frequency radiation emission using evanescent light waves in plasma mirrors”, and will focus on RaDiO and on producing high frequency radiation using low power lasers.
More information about the talk here.

The next edition of the Les Houches plasma physics school will be co-organized by EPP researcher Thomas G and Mickael Grech (LULI, France) in May 2023. The school was planned to occur in 2021, but it was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Les Houches plasma physics school is typically organized every two years at Les Houches, in the beautiful Chamonix Valley in the french Alps, gathering a group of renowned lecturers in plasma physics. Space, astrophysical as well as laboratory plasmas will be considered with a special emphasis on the timely topic of plasmas under extreme conditions as found e.g. in the interior of planets, in the most violent astrophysical environments, or created using extreme-light lasers.

EPP students and lecturers have participated in previous editions of this school in 2013, 2015, and 2019.

The joint European project Effort toward a Highly Productive Programming Environment for Heterogeneous Exascale Computing (EPEEC) has conducted a test on the effective advantages of task-based parallel programming models using ZPIC as a reference High-Performance Computing (HPC) application for kinetic plasma simulations. The results from this test show a path for alternative high-efficiency parallelization of the PIC algorithm that can be straightforwardly applied in many novel architectures, including FPGA and GPGPU based accelerators.

Different task-based implementations of ZPIC have been developed based on the OmpSs-2 programming model and their performance was tested on two classical test plasma physics problems: laser wakefield acceleration and the Weibel instability. Some of the implementations demonstrated near-perfect scaling for 48 cores despite unbalanced conditions, an impressive result accomplished while retaining the code simplicity of task-based programming. More details of this study can be found here.

EPEEC’s main goal is to…

EPP member Marija V was selected by the Lisbon Academy of Sciences to join the Young Scientists Seminar (SJC), in the field of Sciences. The SJC is part of the Institute of High Studies of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences and aims to maintain a link between the Academy and young scientists of exceptional merit in order to stimulate the discussion of socially and scientifically relevant issues through the implementation of activities, such as conferences, colloquia, etc. See Técnico news for more info and for quotes from Marija on this distinction.

Next week’s seminar at University of Rochester will be given by EPP member Jorge V. The seminar will be on Wednesday 24 February 2021 at 2.30pm GMT (9.30am ET) via Zoom. The talk will be entitled “Broadband superradiance with less than a particle per wavelength”, and will focus on findings presented in a recent paper published in Nature Physics.

Marija V is scheduled to give the Oxford ALP seminar, on Monday, Feb 15th, 12:30 CET (11:30 GMT).
The topic of the talk is “Radiation-dominated electron acceleration in plasma channels using extremely intense light”.

More information here.

GoLP is celebrating the international day of Women in Science by launching a Women in Physics group led by Camilla Willim, Marija Vranic, Mariana Moreira and Chiara Badiali. The primary goal of this group is forming and strengthening connections between PhD students at IST across different physics disciplines. Other initiatives will include outreach, coaching and connection with role-model female scientists through formal and informal events. This group’s activities will complement the efforts of Gender Balance @ Técnico, that has been active for the past few years.

The article “Seeded QED cascades in counter-propagating laser pulses” published in Physical Review E in 2017 by Thomas G, Marija V, Joana M, Ricardo F and Luis OS has been selected for a Physical Review E (PRE) Spotlight on Laser-created Pair Plasmas. Each PRE Spotlight represents a small selection of articles, dealing with the same research area. The article provides an exhaustive study about the growth rates of QED cascades in counter-propagating lasers. In addition to the new analytical work developed by the authors, all recent existing theoretical models for the growth rate from other authors are shown and compared to first-principles QED-PIC simulations. A discussion about the cascade’s threshold is included, based on the analytical and numerical results. The paper is available here.