• Luis OS awarded 2nd Advanced Grant from the European Research Council

    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…

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  • PRACE project “Pair-dominated plasmas in ultra intense fields” featured in the GCS website

     
    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.

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  • Awake meeting at IST


    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.

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  • Optical tornados in Nature Communications


    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…

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  • Two images selected as finalists for the European Science Photo Competition 2015

    Two images (Marija Vranic 4 beam QED standing wave, and Paulo Alves’ mini magnetosphere) submitted by our team have been selected as finalists for the European Science Photo Competition 2015 in the non-photographics media category. The finalists from each country are here. The winners in each category will be announced soon.

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  • The “Natas” of Visualization 2015

    Following our tradition (see News for the “2014 Natas”), the prizes for the winners of the image and video of 2015, the “natas” of visualization, were awarded today to Nitin Shukla (left) and to Ujjwal Sinha (right), with the corresponding iPad Mini. As one of the previous winners Paulo Alves nicely described ““Nata” is a tasty Portuguese pastry that everybody likes. It’s as enjoyable as having our simulations running nicely on a big supercomputer. It can also mean being at the top, at a high level, important.” Many congratulations to the 2015 winners!
     

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  • APS 2016 Calendar features picture from our team

    The paper version of the 2016 Calendar of the American Physical Society, sent to all the APS members, features a picture from a paper recently published by our team. The picture had been previously selected for the Phys Rev E Kaleidoscope (see News here) and illustrates the kinetic scale of the mushroom instability first described in “Transverse electron-scale instability in relativistic shear flows” by E. P. Alves, T. Grismayer, R. A. Fonseca, and L. O. Silva published in Phys. Rev. E 92, 021101(R) (2015).

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  • Happy Holidays!

    Happy holidays from everyone at GoLP to all our friends! Thank you all for your hardwork and friendship in 2015, another great year for GoLP.
    Let’s keep on having fun, doing great science, and developing exciting ideas and technologies for an even more successful 2016!

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  • epp team at APS DPP 2015

    epp team members and alumni attended the APS DPP 2015 with several contributed talks and invited talks by Thomas Grismayer and Kevin Schoeffler.

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  • [GoLP out-of-the-box seminar] Catch the perfect wave!

    This Friday, IST is welcoming the legends of giant wave surfing: Ramon Laureano, Joana Andrade and João Guedes. The event is a first in a series of GoLP out-of-the-box seminars and it will take place in Anfiteatro Abreu Faro, Complexo Interdisciplinar, Friday 27th at 16h30. Everyone is welcome to join us in this fantastic surfing adventure.

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