At the closing session of the 48th EPS Plasma Physics Conference (fully virtual), the posters of Rui Torres and Bernardo Malaca were announced as winners of the EPS-DPP best poster awards 2022. They received this award presenting the work with the title “General relativity particle-in-cell simulations of compact neutron star magnetospheres” and “Superradiance from superluminal nonlinear plasma wakefields”.

On June 14th, 2022, 9 am EDT (2 pm WET), our EPP member Marija Vranic will present at a Matter and Radiation at Extremes (MRE) webinar.
MRE is committed to publishing original and impactful research and review papers that address extreme states of matter and radiation, and the associated science and technology employed to produce and diagnose these conditions in the laboratory. Drivers, targets and diagnostics are included along with related numerical simulation and computational methods. It aims to provide a peer-reviewed platform for the international physics community and promote worldwide dissemination of the latest and impactful research in related fields.
For more information, and for the link to the webinar with the title Plasma in extreme fields: challenges and opportunities, which is free and open to the public, please click here.

For PhD students/post-docs/researchers in laser-plasma interactions, this training event is dedicated to the fundamentals of computational modeling of intense laser pulse propagation in plasma, and applications to compact laser plasma-based accelerators. Laser plasma accelerators are one of the most exciting applications of intense lasers and computational modeling plays a critical role in the design and optimization of laser plasma accelerators.
The event, organized in collaboration with Laserlab, takes place over the course of 4 days, with a 2 hour lecture per day where participants will learn the basics of pulse propagation in plasma, and the principles of state-of-the-art laser-plasma computational tools, how to use these tools and perform data analysis.
The computational tool to be used is ZPIC, complemented by Jupyter notebooks. It is a fully relativistic, electromagnetic, and open-source particle-in-cell code. ZPIC builds on the state-of-the-art particle-in-cell OSIRIS, and it features all the basic ingredients of the particle-in-cell scheme without…

In Physics of Plasmas, a collaboration of scientists from Princeton, UCLA, and Instituto Superior Técnico, reports a method to study smaller magnetospheres, sometimes just millimeters thick, in the laboratory.
A magnetized object, such as our planet Earth, is immersed within a stream of ionized gas, called plasma. The region around the object in which this effect is seen is called a magnetosphere.
The Earth’s large magnetosphere that extends out into space, has also the fundamental role of blocking lethal cosmic rays and particles from the sun and stars and allowing life itself to exist.
These mini-magnetospheres have been observed around comets and near-certain regions of the moon and have been suggested to propel spacecraft. They are good testbeds for studying larger planet-sized magnetospheres.
Previous laboratory experiments have been carried out utilizing plasma wind tunnels or high-energy lasers to create mini-magnetospheres. However, these earlier experiments were limited to 1D measurements of magnetic fields that…

EPP team members Luis O. Silva (PI) and Pablo J. Bilbao (co-Pi) have been awarded a total of 33 million core hours at the LUMI supercomputer located in Kajaani, Finland. LUMI is one of the pan-European pre-exascale supercomputers funded in part by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. Who awarded the computational time during the EuroHPC Regular Access call on December of 2021. The project CREPE: Coherent Radiation mechanisms in Extreme Plasma Environment which aims to study plasmas under extreme conditions to address how non-thermal, coherent emission is produced in extreme environments. The project will take advantage of the latest developments by the group to include general relativity and QED effects into account.

The former GoLP PhD student Frederico Fiúza has been recently awarded a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council for his Project XPACE: Extreme Particle Acceleration in Shocks: from the laboratory to astrophysics. In the scope of this project, Frederico will move back to Portugal and carry out his research at IST. The grant will provide 1.8 million euros funding for a period of five years.
Astrophysical shocks, generated by violent interactions of supersonic plasmas, are among the most powerful particle accelerators in the Universe. Over the past decade, discoveries linked to plasmas outside of our own solar system have excited scientists and the public alike. We have been able to observe extraordinary phenomena such as cosmic-ray acceleration in the remnants of supernovae, gravitational waves and their electromagnetic counterparts from neutron star mergers, and jets coming from supermassive black holes. However, the underlying physics of particle acceleration in astrophysical shocks is not yet well understood,…

GoLP supports several full time research fellowships (at MSc, PhD, or post-doc level) for students/researchers from Ukraine (with backgrounds in physics, electrical engineering, applied mathematics, or computer science) in topics of our research portfolio (exp-theory-simulations) that covers laser-plasma physics, lasers, optics, plasma astrophysics, warm dense matter, light sources, high-performance computing, numerical simulations, laser technology (for details check our website http://golp.tecnico.ulisboa.pt and the websites of our two main teams: http://xgolp.tecnico.ulisboa.pt and http://epp.tecnico.ulisboa.pt). We also cover tuition and fees for students transferring to a degree at Instituto Superior Tecnico.
For more information email luis.silva@tecnico.ulisboa.pt.
 

Speaker: George Vahala
Title: Qubit Lattice Algorithm for the Electromagnetic Pulse Propagation in Scalar Dielectric Media
Abstract: There is much interest in examining plasma problems that will be amenable to error-correcting quantum computers. For some years, we have been developing Qubit Lattice Algorithms (QLA) for the solution of nonlinear physics – in particular the Nonlinear Schrodinger Equation (NLS)/Gross Pitaevskii equation in 1D-2D-3D. The 1D soliton physics benchmarked our algorithms, while in 3D we examined scalar quantum turbulence, finding 3 energy cascades on a 5760³ grid using 11k processors (2009). For spinor BEC simulations the QLA were ideally parallelized on classical supercomputers (tested to over 760k cores on IBM Mira). QLA is a mesoscopic representation of interleaved non-commuting sequence of collision/streaming operators which in the continuum limit perturbatively reproduce the physics equations of interest. The collision operators entangle the local on-site qubits, while the streaming operators spread this entanglement throughout the lattice….

The EPP member and invited Professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico of the University of Lisbon, Marija Vranic, is the winner of the 2022 PRACE Ada Lovelace Award for HPC for her outstanding impact on HPC in Europe. Dr. Vranic has not only pioneered techniques for simulating extreme plasmas, but she is also actively involved in improving the visibility of women in physics and HPC — for instance, by reducing the gender imbalance of invited speakers at scientific conferences and mentoring the Women in Physics student group at IST.
Many congratulations to Marija!

Ricardo Fonsenca, research member of GoLP, talked about his work on ’90 segundos de ciência’. In this brief interview, Ricardo presented the many applications of computational plasma physics, the recent collaboration with CERN’s AWAKE experiment, and how plasma particle accelerators will revolutionize techniques in medicine and industry.