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.

The IBM Prize was awarded January 16 2019 to Marija V in a ceremony at IST presided by the President of the Portuguese Republic. The official information from the Portuguese Presidency is here. Many congratulations to Marija on the prize and on the inspiring talk!

Marija V will be awarded the IBM Prize Jan 16 in a ceremony to be presided by the President of the Portuguese Republic at 5pm in Salão Nobre of IST. More information here.

We wish everyone, our friends, colleagues, and collaborators a great 2019! We look forward to another year of hard word, lots of fun, and exciting science!

Nitin S has been awarded 1250000 CPUh on the supercomputer Marconi (Cineca, Italy) in the framework of HPC-Europa3 Transnational Access programme. The HPC-Europa3 programme is supported by the EC Research Innovation Action under the H2020 Programme. It provides funding and offers access to European HPC centers. According to the programme, Nitin will visit Cineca for 4 weeks to closely work with researchers from the Supercomputing Applications and Innovation department. Nitin presented a project on collisionless shocks and was one of 45 selected candidates in this call. More information here.