From 14-17 of June, Afonso Mota, a 16 year old, 10th grade student from Valsassina School, will be staying at GoLP for an internship as part of the project “my first work experience”.
Afonso is interested in Astrophysics and gravitation. Despite his young age, he will be learning the basics of Mathematica and Matlab programming languages and applying them to understand the orbits of the planets in the solar system and the periodicity of the tides on earth. Besides his work, he will have the opportunity to interact with all the members at GoLP to learn about the exciting research that is being performed.
Welcome Afonso!

The editorial board of JPP is holding a meeting in Lisbon to discuss the exciting recent developments in Plasma Physics and the future directions for the Journal of Plasma Physics (Peter Catto, Per Helander, Thierry Passot, Neil Hammond, Bill Dorland, Alex Schekochihin, Troy Carter, Dmitri Uzdensky, Jon Arons, Beth Woodhouse, Cary Forest, and Luis OS.

On May 23 2016, and on the celebration of the 105 years of IST, the President of the Portuguese Republic, Prof. Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa (in the picture), announced that he will award Luis OS the title of “Grande Oficial” of the “Ordem da Instrução Pública”. This distinction is among the highest recognitions that can be bestowed to portuguese citizens or organizations by the President (IST News here in Portuguese only)

In the new institutional video of IST Luis OS has a cameo role presenting some of the Jorge V’s work on the generation of intense B-fields in underdense laser-plasma interactions, which was recently published in Nature Physics.

Luis OS, Thomas G, and Kevin S are attending the HEDLA 2016 conference at SLAC/Stanford, where they will present some of our exciting work on these topics (Thomas G will deliver an invited talk and Kevin a contributed talk, with more 5 posters with our team’s work). They will also catch up with our illustrious alumni Fiuza and Paulo now at SLAC/Stanford.
 

Today was another great GoLP Day organized by our group members Gareth Williams, Elisabetta Boella and Ana Luisa. Besides the classic “Marshmallow Challenge” there was also the opportunity to avoid a nuclear meltdown with many more moments of interaction and fun in Mouraria and all around Lisbon.

Our team has been awarded a second Advanced Grant from the European Research Council in the most recent call. Luis O. Silva was first awarded an Advanced Grant in 2010. This is the first time a researcher working in Portugal in Physical Sciences and Engineering (one of the three major areas of the ERC) has been awarded twice with an Advanced Grant. Luis O. Silva is also the youngest scientist in Europe in Exact Sciences to be awarded twice with an Advanced Grant (data from 2015).
According to the European Research Council, the “ERC Advanced Grants are designed to allow outstanding research leaders of any nationality and any age to pursue ground-breaking, high-risk projects in Europe.”
The project, called InPairs, aims to study how intense electromagnetic fields, such as lasers, can be converted into matter and anti-matter, a direct illustration of Einstein’s E = mc2. Using the fastest supercomputers…

 
The PRACE project “Pair-dominated plasmas in ultra intense fields: from the laboratory to extreme astrophysical conditions” has been featured in the website of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing, with a description of the key results of the project. This PRACE project has contributed to the goals of the starting FCT grant and the ERC Advanced Grant Accelerates. The article is available here.

A preparation meeting for the AWAKE experiment will be held from March 9 to March 11at IST, hosted by Jorge Vieira and Nelson Lopes. The goal of AWAKE is to use proton bunches from the Super Proton Synchrotron (the last ring before protons are injected into the LHC) at CERN as a driver for plasma waves capable of accelerating electrons to high energies in a short distance. The experiment is currently under preparation, and this meeting will be on the latest status of the experimental campaign. The detailed agenda is here <https://indico.cern.ch/event/484032/timetable/>. The meeting will be held at the IST meeting room in the Central Building. On Friday afternoon, Prof. Allen Caldwell will deliver the GoLP VIP Seminar.

A new paper in Nature Communications by Jorge Vieira et al. in the January 2016 issue demonstrates how to amplify optical tornados to unprecedented intensities. The paper generalizes the concept of Raman amplification to laser pulses with orbital angular momentum.
Optical tornados have applications in compact accelerators and brilliant x-ray sources, faster optical communication devices, and optical computing.
Research led by a team at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, found an novel way of creating intense optical tornados, unusual forms of laser light beams that spin during propagation. This discovery was published on January 28th in the journal Nature Communications.
Optical tornadoes, i.e. laser beams with a vortex structure, may revolutionise our understanding of how matter behaves under extreme and so far unexplored conditions. At ultrahigh intensities, however, their production in the laboratory remains a challenge. The published paper proposes…