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.

Our team member Nitin S has successfully defended his PhD thesis on June 19, 2019. Many congratulations to Nitin (center) and all the best for his future life & sci endeavors In the picture, Nitin rejoices with his thesis committee (from left to right: Ricardo F, Jorge V, Nitin S, Bob Bingham and Tito Mendonça).

Hundreds of people visited Instituto Superior Técnico last Thursday (May 23rd) to celebrate its 108th anniversary. For the occasion, we let them dive into the plasma realm with virtual reality, sounds, images, and videos realized from our research (most of them available here).

Fabio C was awarded the best talk Journal of Plasma Physics prize at 2019 Les Houches Plasma Physics School, with his presentation on “Particle-in-cell simulations of pair discharges at pulsar polar caps”. Evan Heintz (University of Winsconsin), Alice Giroul (Queen Mary University of London) and Sonakshi Sachdev (Chennai Mathematical Institute) were also awarded talk and poster prizes. All prize winners and school organizers Benoît Cerutti (Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble), Miho Janvier (Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale) and Emmanuel D’Humières (Université de Bordeaux) are in the picture above.
The school was held at École des Physique des Houches in the Chamonix Valley, and focused on the multiple approaches to plasma physics, from laboratory to astrophysics. “Extreme Plasma Physics” was one of the advanced lectures of the school, delivered by Thomas G. More information about the school here.

Thomas G and Fabio C attended the 2019 Les Houches Plasma Physics School, held on May 13-24 at École des Physique des Houches, in the Chamonix Valley. The school, focused on the multiple approaches to plasma physics, from laboratory to astrophysics, covered a wide range of fundamental aspects of plasma physics, as well as on the state-of-the-art in many of its sub-disciplines. Thomas G delivered a lecture on “Extreme Plasma Physics”, and Fabio C gave a contributed talk on “Particle-in-cell simulations of pair discharges at pulsar polar caps”. With his presentation, Fabio C was awarded the best talk prize, sponsored by the Journal of Plasma Physics. More information about the school is available here.

GoLP organised and hosted the visit of Gérard Mourou to Portugal that included talks at Pavilhão do Conhecimento, at IST, and at U.Porto, with dinner with GoLP PIs, the president of IPFN, and the president of DF, and the visit to one of the CPA labs of GoLP.

Luis OS, Ricardo F, Thomas G, and Marija V attended SPIE 2019 in Prague, from April 1st to April 3rd to deliver invited talks on extreme plasma physics, exascale computing, beam-beam physics and probing strong-field QED, and positron and gamma ray sources from intense laser-matter interactions.This was also an opportunity to strengthen our ongoing collaborations and discuss joint projects with several of the attendees.

The CERN Accelerator School on High Gradient Wakefield Accelerators was held 11-22 March 2019, in Sesimbra, Portugal, with more than 90 participants and lecturers. The CERN Accelerator Schools are organised by CERN and this time, GoLP was responsible for the local organisation. Our team members delivered several talks, and were responsible for the hands on workshop on plasma simulations. The president of IST delivered one of the keynote special lectures, on Artificial Intelligence.

And you don’t need to go to Belém to get them, because the best are right here! Following our tradition (see the “2014 Natas”, “2015 Natas”, “2016 Natas”, “2017 Natas”), the prizes for the winners of the image and video of 2018, the “natas” of visualization, were awarded to Giannandrea Inchingolo (left, also 2016 winner) and to Miguel Pardal (right). 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.” Many congratulations to the 2018 winners! The images and videos have been posted on the team website here and will be posted over the next few weeks on GoLP’s Facebook page.