Author archive for Luis O. Silva

PhD student Filipe C was awarded one of the Fulbright Portugal 2025/2026 PhD scholarships for research activities in U.S. institutions. This support will allow him to spend 6 months at the Plasma Simulation Group of the University of California, Los Angeles, where he will be collaborating with Prof. Warren Mori to study whether the incoherent properties of light could mitigate the laser-plasma instabilities that compromise Inertial Confinement Fusion.

 
 

In an article recently featured on the cover of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team of researchers from the University of Oxford (Robert J. Ewart, Michael L. Nastac, Alexander A. Schekochihin) and from GoLP/IPFN (Pablo B, Thales S, Luís OS) uncovered how collisionless plasmas relax to equilibrium under the action of turbulence.
While collisional plasmas achieve Maxwellian distributions through particle collisions, the study shows that in collisionless plasmas, turbulent dynamics alone drive relaxation toward universal, but non-Maxwellian, equilibria featuring power-law energy distributions. Theoretical predictions were confirmed through large-scale numerical simulations performed by the GoLP team, which captured the turbulent cascade and the progressive erosion of phase-space conservation over time. These results reveal that turbulence can induce a gradual loss of memory of the plasma’s initial state, leading to the emergence of universal equilibria determined by the nature of the turbulent mixing.
This work advances…

In a recent paper in Science Advances, Pablo B, Thales S, and Luis OS show that radiatively cooled relativistic plasmas can spontaneously emit coherent, polarized radiation via the maser instability. This is a universal feature of relativistically hot plasmas embedded in ultra strong magnetic fields, such as plasmas in the magnetospheres of neutron stars, and should also be observable in laboratory conditions. The paper was also featured in a long story in the national newspaper Publico (.pt) and at the IST website .(.en)

In a recent Letter in Physical Review D, selected for the Physics newsmagazine of the American Physical Society and as Editor’s Suggestion, a team of researchers of GoLP (Nitin S, now at CINECA, Kevin S, now in Bochum U, and Luis OS), established a new strong bound on dark electromagnetism, the equivalent of electromagnetism to dark mattter. Dark matter and its properties are at the core of some of the most fundamental questions in physics and the present work shows that plasma physics inspired models and simulations can help constrain some of the properties of dark matter.
The simplest model for an electromagnetic-like interaction in the dark sector is equivalent to the electromagnetic interaction between opposite dark charge identical mass particles i.e. dark electromagnetism. Under this hypothesis, dark matter can behave like a cold collisionless plasma of self-interacting dark matter particles, and exhibit plasma-like instabilities with observational consequences.The…

In 2020, the Ministry of Science celebrates 25 years of the first Ministry of Science in Portugal. Our team will be present with the installation of Giannandrea I and Fabio C, Turbulence Voice of Space and GoLP VR Lab on April 17th 2020 in Teatro Thalia.

 

And now they come in three flavours! Following our tradition (see the “2014 Natas”, “2015 Natas”, “2016 Natas”, “2017 Natas”, “2018 Natas“), the prizes for the winners of the image, video, and VR of 2019, the “natas” of visualization, were awarded to Kevin Schoeffler (center), Nitin Shukla (right, in the slide, 2nd time winner), and Fabio Cruz (left, 4th time winner). The term “Nata” was coined by one of the previous winners Paulo Alves: “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.” Nata is also a new open source visualisation framework recently launched by epp team members. Many congratulations to the 2019 winners! The images and videos have been posted on the team website here and will…

Luis OS will deliver a plenary talk at the 47th European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics (EPS2020) in Sitges near Barcelona, Spain, that will be held from June 22 to 26, 2020. The talk will address recent advances in the emerging field of extreme plasma physics.

On December 5 2019, Luis OS was elected corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon. Founded in 1779, the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon, comprises two classes (Sciences and Letters), each with seven sections, with up to 5 members and 10 corresponding members per class. Luis OS was elected in the section of Physics.

Happy holidays to all our researchers, professionals, families, alumni, and friends, and a Happy 2020 with lots of personal and professional successes and great science! (and don´t forget to check the GoLP VR Lab with your new Oculus!)

In the most recent PRACE call for supercomputing time, Luis Silva and Jorge Vieira, GoLP/IPFN researchers and professors in the physics department, have received 36 million cpu-core hours for MareNostrum in Spain and 60 million cpu-core hours for Piz Daint in Switzerland, respectively. The award for Luis Silva is the second year renewal of the project PULSAR, aimed at understanding, from first principles, the magnetosphere of compact objects such as pulsars and black holes, and the award for Jorge Vieira is for the one year project OptiMom, with the goal of investigating how intense laser beams with exotic properties could enhance compact plasma accelerators and light sources. The estimated combined value of these awards exceeds 2 Million euros, and corresponds to the computing power of 11000 cores running continuously for one year.