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…

Two images (Marija Vranic 4 beam QED standing wave, and Paulo Alves’ mini magnetosphere) submitted by our team have been selected as finalists for the European Science Photo Competition 2015 in the non-photographics media category. The finalists from each country are here. The winners in each category will be announced soon.

Following our tradition (see News for the “2014 Natas”), the prizes for the winners of the image and video of 2015, the “natas” of visualization, were awarded today to Nitin Shukla (left) and to Ujjwal Sinha (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 2015 winners!
 

The paper version of the 2016 Calendar of the American Physical Society, sent to all the APS members, features a picture from a paper recently published by our team. The picture had been previously selected for the Phys Rev E Kaleidoscope (see News here) and illustrates the kinetic scale of the mushroom instability first described in “Transverse electron-scale instability in relativistic shear flows” by E. P. Alves, T. Grismayer, R. A. Fonseca, and L. O. Silva published in Phys. Rev. E 92, 021101(R) (2015).

Happy holidays from everyone at GoLP to all our friends! Thank you all for your hardwork and friendship in 2015, another great year for GoLP.
Let’s keep on having fun, doing great science, and developing exciting ideas and technologies for an even more successful 2016!

epp team members and alumni attended the APS DPP 2015 with several contributed talks and invited talks by Thomas Grismayer and Kevin Schoeffler.

This Friday, IST is welcoming the legends of giant wave surfing: Ramon Laureano, Joana Andrade and João Guedes. The event is a first in a series of GoLP out-of-the-box seminars and it will take place in Anfiteatro Abreu Faro, Complexo Interdisciplinar, Friday 27th at 16h30. Everyone is welcome to join us in this fantastic surfing adventure.

Timon Mehrling has joined our team to work with Ricardo on several projects connected with the future of Osiris. Timon joins our team with a prestigious DAAD P.R.I.M.E. Fellowship, jointly with the University of Hamburg, after obtaining his PhD degree from the University of Hamburg and DESY under the supervision of Dr. Jens Osterhoff and Prof. Brian Foster.

Many congratulations to Paulo Alves (IST PhD), now post doc at SLAC/Stanford, and Fabrizio Del Gaudio (Poli Torino MSc), André Lopes (IST MSc) and Fábio Cruz (IST MSc) (all will join the APPLAuSE PhD Program) for their recent graduation with excellent marks.