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.

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.