Epp team members were awarded with a 20 million core-hour allocation at the TIER-0 supercomputer Marenostrum V at the Barcelona Supercomputer Center. The allocation was granted by Rede Nacional de Computação Avançada (RNCA). The project “Modeling Extreme Plasma Accelerators and Light Sources” will investigate advanced plasma accelerators and light sources in combination with structured light, focusing on high-quality electron acceleration and superradiant emission in plasma-based accelerators.

Our research group has been awarded 9 million CPU hours on Cineca’s Leonardo supercomputer in Italy. This significant allocation in Leonardo, one of Europe’s leading supercomputers, will support our efforts in the understanding of plasma instabilities in exotic scenarios. The allocation is led by Thales Silva as PI.
Figure: Simulation result of the magnetic field from the Weibel instability in exotic plasmas

Jorge V, research member of GoLP, will be talking about his work on ’90 segundos de ciência’. In this interview, Jorge will speak about plasma accelerators, starting from their advantages to their possible applications. The episode will be streamed on the 23rd of July, at 5 pm (WET) and with a replay on the 24th of July at 11 am (WET).

In a study published in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, have investigated magnetic reconnection in lunar-relevant mini-magnetospheres. The team, including Filipe D. Cruz, Fábio Cruz, and Luis O. Silva from the Instituto Superior Técnico, used advanced laboratory experiments and particle-in-cell simulations using the code OSIRIS to uncover critical insights into the microphysics of collisionless space plasmas. Their findings reveal the formation of Hall fields and electron-only reconnection driven by kinetic effects, contributing to our understanding of space plasma dynamics near the lunar surface.

The University of Lisbon (ULisboa), with the support of Caixa Geral de Depósitos, awards the annual University of Lisbon/Caixa Geral de Depósitos Scientific Awards, which aim to reward scientific research activity and encourage the practice of international publication of recognized quality and impact.
Some pictures from the event:
 

The experimental results from the Fireball (HRMT-62) project, achieved last year at CERN’s SPS HiRadMat facility, have now been published in Nature Communications and featured in the prominent Portuguese newspaper, Público. Our team, including Filipe Cruz, Pablo J. Bilbao, and Luis O. Silva, played a key role by providing numerical simulations that helped design the experimental platform. Under the leadership of Charles Arrowsmith and Gianluca Gregori from Oxford University, the project brought together researchers from institutions such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Rochester University, University of Iceland, Max Planck Institute, and IST, showcasing a strong international collaboration.
The experiment focused on generating high-density, quasi-neutral electron-positron plasmas by directing a 440 GeV/c proton beam at a specially designed target. This effort marks a significant milestone, as it is the first successful creation of such plasmas in a controlled laboratory setting. The data collected revealed that the generated electron-positron beams…

A team of researchers from IST has recently published a paper entitled: “Direct laser acceleration in underdense plasmas with multi-PW lasers: A path to high-charge, GeV class electron bunches.” in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters. The work was done in collaboration with researchers from the University of Michigan and University of California San Diego.
The most powerful lasers in the world can accelerate electrons to extreme energies, making them almost as fast as light. To accomplish this, it is necessary to ensure stable propagation of such laser pulses over tens of centimetres of plasma, which can be very challenging. By changing the acceleration strategy, the team has demonstrated how to reduce the typical acceleration distance to just a few millimetres and identified the possibility of accelerating a thousand times more particles than in other laser-based schemes. This micro-accelerator holds a potential to decrease the cost and size of…

The epp projects PILARS: Particle and intense-laser interactions, acceleration, and radiation sources and Masers in Astrophysical Plasmas (MAPs), led by PIs Lucas Ivan Iñigo Gamiz and Pablo J. Bilbao, respectively. Have been awarded a total of 40 million core hours at the newest and largest supercomputer in Portugal Deucalion jointly funded by FCT and the European HPC Joint Undertaking. Both projects were among the top 4 projects submitted. They were selected due to the relevance of the topic, the cutting-edge methods available to the researchers at GoLP, and the expertise within the group.
The projects aim to study plasmas under extreme conditions in the laboratory and astrophysics. The PILARS project will investigate novel ways of accelerating electrons to high-charge, accelerating positrons, seeding of QED cascades, and provide reproducible experimental schemes for the up-and-coming commission of next-generation petawatt laser facilities.  MAPs aims to study how plasmas can produce coherent radiation relevant to…

The computing project led by epp team member J. Vieira was selected as a Success Story of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. The project, titled ‘Plasma Accelerator-Based Light sources’, focused on the possible use of collective plasma motion to emit very bright radiation. Project highlights include using structured light to enhance ion acceleration (lead by epp team member C. Willim, published here in Physical Review Research); a new mechanism to mitigate the hosing instability in plasma accelerators (lead by former epp team member M. Moreira, published in Physical Review Letters); and a superradiant quasiparticle light sources in plasma accelerators , which leveraged the Radiation Diagnostic for Osiris (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpc.2022.108634, also check the video).
 

A plasma wave (in blue) excited by a laser can travel at speeds faster than the speed of light, generating bright single-cycle light…

A recent paper by GoLP researchers has been chosen as Editor’s Pick in the American Institute of Physics’ (AIP) journal Physics of Plasmas. This distinction recognizes the research’s potential impact, clarity, and overall quality. The study explores the behavior of plasmas under extremely powerful electromagnetic fields, encountered in both labs with ultra-intense lasers and around celestial objects like pulsars and magnetars. The team’s findings reveal that radiation emitted from hot plasmas in such fields can alter their equilibrium state. These results may hold the key to explaining puzzling astrophysical observations, suggesting a different behaviour for plasmas surrounding these objects than previously thought.