We have started a new initiative to foster training in plasma physics using computer simulations taking advantage of a new set of self-contained PIC codes developed by Ricardo F taking advantage of all the know-how built around Osiris. The initiative is led by Jorge V and will soon be deployed in classes at IST, and opened to all the community. More information here.

The 10 years of the European Research Council are celebrated this week all over Europe #ERC10yrs. Thank you very much for the support to our group through Accelerates (AdG2010) and InPairs (AdG2015).
 

The radio show 90 segundos de ciência, featuring science made in Portugal, has highlighted the work of the epp team on pair production with ultra intense lasers and in astrophysics (episode 73). More information here.

Following our tradition (see News for the “2014 Natas” and News for the “2015 Natas”), the prizes for the winners of the image and video of 2016, the “natas” of visualization, were awarded to Fabio Cruz (left, and double winner after the 2014 award) and to Giannandrea Inchingolo (right), with the corresponding iPad Mini. As one of the previous winners Paulo Alves nicely described ““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 2016 winners!

Marija Vranic has been awarded a FCT Post Doctoral Fellowship to work in our team. Many congratulations to Marija on this prestigious recognition!

 

 
The first edition of the APPLAuSE Workshop was held on January 18th at Centro de Congressos, IST. In this event, the epp PhD students enrolled in the APPLAuSE doctoral program – Giannandrea I, Anton H, Fábio C, Fabrizio DG and Mario G – presented the recent developments of their work in oral and poster presentations. This workshop also hosted an IPFN colloquium by Luis OS, with the title ‘Extreme Plasmas: from surfing at the speed of light to boiling the vacuum’.

The recent paper by Jorge V in Physical Review Letters is featured on the cover of the Physical Review Letters issue of December 23 2016. The paper is published here.

As part of the celebrations for the holidays, GoLP gathered at MAAT in Belém for another GoLP Day on Dec 16.

One of the 2016 Gulbenkian Prizes for Stimulus to Scientific Research in the area of “Earth and Space Sciences” was awarded Fábio C for his project “Multiscale modeling of pulsar magnetospheres”.In this project, Fábio will model pulsar magnetospheres – one the most extreme and exotic environments in the Universe – using advanced numerical tools, capable of solving the self-­consistent collective dynamics of the electron­-positron (e-e+) plasmas surrounding these compact astronomical objects. Moreover, by resorting to ab initio massively parallel simulations, it will be possible to model, for the first time, the formation process of the e-e+ cascades in the vacuum gaps of pulsar magnetospheres due to quantum electrodynamical (QED) processes in a realistic geometry. Understanding the self-consistent dynamics of these e-e+ cascades that supply the pulsar magnetospheric plasma, and bridging this microscopic scale physics with a global, macroscopic model, will allow an identification of the key signatures in the electromagnetic (incoherent and coherent, from the radio to…

A new paper by Jorge V et al just accepted in Physical Review Letters demonstrates how to generate high orbital angular momentum harmonics in close analogy with high harmonic generation of the laser frequency. The paper is already available on arXiv here.