The next CERN Accelerator School will be co-organized by GoLP from 11 to 22 March 2019, in Sesimbra, Portugal. The school will be devoted to High Gradient Wakefield Accelerators and it will bring to Portugal top specialists in plasma based accelerators. Students are welcomed to apply. More information here.
 

Marija V has been awarded the IBM Prize 2017. This is one of the most prestigious and longest running science prizes in Portugal (this year is the 28th edition) and recognises contributions in computational science and computer science. Previous awardees include epp and GoLP members Luis OS and Samuel Martins. Marija is developing work on computational methods to describe the interactions of light at extreme intensities. Many congratulations to Marija!

A new FET project, launched on 1 October 2018, the European joint Effort toward a Highly Productive Programming Environment for Heterogeneous Exascale Computing (3.9 M Euros) aimed at the development and deployment a production-ready parallel programming environment features Osiris as one of the key applications. epp team member Ricardo F is one of the project participants. More information here and here.

At the recent APS DPP 2018 meeting, on November 8 2018, GoLP and epp team alumnus Frederico F was awarded the Stix Award of the APS. Fiuza is the fifth awardee (and the 2nd IST alumni to be awarded this prestigious prize to recognise outstanding early career contributions to plasma physics). Many congratulations to Frederico Fiuza.

Our team was present at the APS DPP 2018, with an invited talk by Marija V, and contributed talks and poster presentations by Ricardo F, Kevin S, Thales S, Nitin S, Giannandrea I, Fabio C, and Miguel P. The work by Marija V was featured as a press release of the APS DPP 2018 that was highlighted by several outlets (e.g. ScienceDaily, Phys.org and DOE’s NewsWise). The APS DPP 2018 was also another excellent chance to meet all the GoLP and epp team alumni, friends, and collaborators, and to keep up our commitment to continuously raising the bar.

Our team has been awarded a multi-year project PRACE allocation in the 17th call for the project PULSAR (first year allocation: 40 million cpu-core hour). This proposal, one of the 42 selected for supercomputing time, addresses the challenges and supports the ERC Advanced Grant InPairs. The allocation is assigned for the great MareNostrum4 at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. More information here.

The Executive Committee of HEDLA has awarded IST the organisation of the next HEDLA meeting to be held in 2020, in the week of May 25 (#HEDLA2020). This will be the 22th anniversary (13th edition) of the HEDLA conference, first organized in Pleasanton, CA in 1996. Previous editions were hosted by Osaka U, SLAC/Stanford, and U. Bordeaux. This conference  will be a great opportunity to discuss exciting recent work and future prospects in laboratory astrophysics. During the past decade, research teams around the world have developed astrophysics-relevant research utilizing high energy-density facilities such as intense lasers and z-pinches. Research is underway in many areas, such as compressible hydrodynamic mixing, shock phenomena, magnetic reconnection, turbulence, jets, dynamos, heat conduction, radiative transport, complex opacities, equations of state, warm dense matter, relativistic plasmas, pair plasmas, and QED. HEDLA will showcase these results and will establish further bridges with the astrophysics community.

In a paper published today, August 29, in the journal Nature, the AWAKE collaboration at CERN, which includes Luis OS, Jorge V, Nelson L, Ricardo F, Mariana M, and Anton H, from GoLP/IST, reports the first ever successful acceleration of electrons using a wave generated by protons zipping through a plasma. The acceleration obtained over a given distance is already several times higher than that of conventional technologies currently available for particle accelerators. First proposed in the 1970s, the use of plasma waves (or so called wakefields) has the potential to drastically reduce the size of accelerators in the next several decades.
The image, by Jorge V, illustrates the concept: the proton beam breaks up in small beamlets (yellow), that drive a plasma wave and the corresponding electric field (blue isosurfaces), that accelerate the co-propagating electrons (small spheres, where color is proportional to the energy of the electrons).
AWAKE,…

The new collection of Plasma Physics in Nature Communications features three publications where our team is involved, three of the four sections of the collection (Fundamental Properties of Plasma, Particle Accelerators, and Laboratory and Astrophysical Plasma).

The recent issue of the Horizons Magazine, the EU Research & Innovation Magazine features an article about the research of our team in the ERC Advanced Grant InPairs. In the section “Frontier Research”, the article titled “Antimatter plasma reveals secrets of deep space signals“ explores some of the results of two ongoing ERC Advanced Grants, covering both the work at GoLP and the work at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching, Munich, and how these works bridge the gap between one of the most exotic states of matter (electron-positron plasma) and astrophysical and laboratory conditions.