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!)

Luís OS was recently elected fellow of the European Academy of Sciences (EurASc). IST has two professors that are fellows of the EurASC, Luis OS and Armando Pombeiro. Luis is the first Portuguese to be part of the Physics division and the sixth Portuguese to join the prestigious academy.
 

The next edition of the Les Houches plasma physics school will be co-organized by EPP researcher Thomas G and Mickael Grech (LULI, France). This school, held every two years at Les Houches, in the beautiful Chamonix Valley in the french Alps, gathers 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.

Our team will host a mini-workshop on topological light-matter states in collaboration with CFTP and IT including presentations from Konstantin Bliokh (Riken, Japan), Jorge Vieira, Igor Ivanov (CFTP) and Mario Silveirinha (IT). The mini-workshop has the goal of exploring potential relationships between fundamental advances in nonlinear optics, photonics, plasma physics and high energy physics. More information about the program of the workshop, which will be held on October 28th (Anfiteatro Abreu Faro), can be found here.

EPP team members Jorge V, Thales S, Anton H, and Mariana M (all in the picture above) went to Isola d’Elba in Italy to attend the 4th European Advanced Accelerators Workshop, held on 15-21 September 2019.
Jorge V was one of the co-leaders of the theory and simulations working group and also attended the EuroNNAc meeting on the 22th of September. Thales S and Anton H delivered talks, whereas Mariana M presented a poster about their recent work.

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.

Mariana M (in the picture) was awarded a PPCF/EPS/IUPAP PhD Poster Prize at EPS 2019 conference, with her “Study of beam hosing in different regimes”. The conference was held on July 8-12 in Milan, Italy.

EPP team members Ricardo F, Thomas G, Marija V, Thales S, Fabrizio del G, Mariana M and alumni Paulo A (all in the picture above) attended the 46th European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics (EPS 2019), held on July 8-12 2019 in Milan, Italy.
Thomas G (plenary), Thales S (contributed), and Fabrizio del G (invited at a satellite workshop on High-Field Laser-Plasma Interaction, HFLPI) delivered talks, whereas Ricardo F, Mariana M and Giannandrea I presented posters. Marija V was part of the programme committee and the organization of HFLPI.

EPP team members were at Encontro Ciência 2019 on July 8-10. In this annual meeting of the Portuguese researchers, held at Centro de Congressos de Lisboa, our team showed recent virtual reality (VR) demos, including results from simulations of plasma turbulence, neutron stars and laser wakefield acceleration. For three days, the meeting attendants could dive in the plasma realm and take a look at some of our research from a different, fully immersive perspective.
Our participation in this meeting was also covered by SIC Notícias and the YouTube channel of Encontro Ciência 2019.
The GoLP VR demos are done in collaboration with the Virtual Beamline team at ELI Beamlines, Czech Republic.

The Accelerator Research and Innovation for European Science and Society (ARIES) project is an Integrating Activity project which aims to develop European particle accelerator infrastructures. Our team has been involved in the modeling of plasma based accelerators, namely through our research on laser plasma accelerators driven by ultra-intense twisted laser pulses. Following the successful ARIES anual meeting in Budapest in 2019, IST will now host and organise the 3rd ARIES Annual Meeting, which will be held at IST from 20 to 24 April 2020. Click here and here for more info on ARIES and on the meeting.