Author archive for Luis O. Silva

In a paper recently published in Physical Review Letters, epp team researchers have demonstrated that in the downstream of electrostatic shocks the electron distribution function can be Weibel unstable and large amplitude magnetic fields are generated. These magnetic fields do not affect the shock dynamics but can modify the signatures usually considered for electrostatic shocks such as the radiation spectrum of the downstream particles. The paper can be found here

Kevin Schoeffler has joined our team as a post-doctoral fellow to work on magnetic field dynamics generated in conditions associated with intense laser-plasma interactions and on fundamental questions associated with magnetic reconnection resorting to massively parallel kinetic simulations.

André Lopes has joined the epp team for his MSc thesis at IST (MEFT). His thesis will be focused on the exploration of nonlinear processes in plasma metamaterials working in close collaboration with Paulo Alves.

Paulo Alves has been awarded the ENAA Outstanding Talk Prize at the “XXIV National Meeting of Astronomy and Astrophysics” organized by the Portuguese Society of Astronomy held in Porto (July 17-18, 2014). Paulo presented his latest results on large-scale magnetic field generation via electron-scale instabilities in unmagnetized shear flows.

A picture produced by Paulo Alves and Thomas Grismayer is featured on the cover of the Transactions for the SuperMUC Review Workshop which reports the main scientific achievements obtained with SuperMUC in the past year. A report by Jorge Vieira is also included in these transactions.
 

On May 22, Elisabetta successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled “Ion acceleration driven by intense laser pulses” at Politecnico di Torino (dual degree with Doutoramento in Physics at IST). Many congratulations to Elisabetta!

The universe is filled with magnetic fields. However, it is widely accepted that in the early universe they did not exist. An important scientific question is how these magnetic fields could have grown from nothing to the level we find them today. epp team members, Ricardo Fonseca and Luís O. Silva, collaborated with  Kevin Schoeffler, and Nuno Loureiro on a paper published in Physical Review Letters addressing this issue. They demonstrate using first principle simulations how magnetic fields are formed by only gradients in the pressure and density. This generation of magnetic fields also plays an important role in many high power laser experiments, which generate magnetic fields on the order of megagauss. These fields form via both the previously predicted Biermann battery mechanism as well as a kinetic plasma instability known as the Weibel instability, depending on the system parameters. These results should have an important impact on both the…