Jorge V, Diana A, and Luis OS are attending the European Advanced Accelerator Concepts Workshop 2015 in the Island of Elba to deliver two plenary talks and one poster. This is the second workshop of this series, almost doubling the number of participants of the last edition. Great science combined with the unique setting of Biodola, excellent food, very nice beach, and great friends.

A cool picture from our recent paper “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) has been selected for the section Kaleidoscope of Physical Review E. According to the editors “All figures published in Physical Review E are eligible for selection by the editors for display on our web site; we choose figures on aesthetic merit.”

Marija explains on IST TV all about the recent PRACE 69 million cpu core hours award (in portuguese) and the relevance of high intensity OAM pulses for a wide range of fundamental physics processes and applications.

As part of the GoLP tradition, the GoLP summer celebration was held this year on July 30th at Viva Lisboa, followed by a stroll to the Mu ice cream shop in Campo dos Mártires da Pátria. Happy summer holidays to all GoLPers, alumni and friends!

epp team members Joana LM, Luis OS, Marija V, Pedro C, and Thomas G participated in the Conference on Extremely High Intensity Laser Physics in Heidelberg from July 21 to July 25. This conference brings together the leading experts in physics at ultra high laser intensities, covering topics such as QED, laser-plasma interactions, radiation, numerical simulations and experiments, with posters by Joana LM, Marija V, and Pedro C, and invited talk by Thomas G.

The epp team has been awarded an equivalent of 8000 years of computation on Fermi by PRACE for the project “Amplification and propagation of intense tailored laser pulses in underdense plasmas” (co-PIs: M. Vranic, J. Vieira, L. O. Silva). The project will explore how specially tailored pulses (with orbital angular momentum, pre-designed spectral features, or tailored intensity profiles e.g. sequences of trailing pulses) interact with plasmas and their potential impact on a wide range of scientific and technological applications. The project of the epp eam was selected together with 17 others among the total of 107 proposals submitted to the 11th PRACE call.

epp MSc student Fábio Cruz was awarded the 2nd prize for Best Poster in the 12th International School/Symposium for Space Simulations (ISSS-12), out of approximately 50 posters, with his work “PIC Simulations of Collisionless Shocks in Mini Magnetospheres”. ISSS-12 was held in Prague, Czech Republic, on July 03-10 2015 and gathered some of the world experts in computational solar and space plasma physics.

Jorge V will present an invited talk at the upcoming ICHED 2015 in San Diego. His talk will address “Large Scale Magnetic Field Generation In Laser Under-Dense Plasma Interactions” focusing on the results recently published in Nature Physics.

epp team members Thomas Grismayer and Kevin Schoeffler will deliver two invited talks at the upcoming 57th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics, November 16-20, 2015 in Savannah, Georgia. Thomas G talk will address QED cascades in ultra intense laser pulses, while Kevin S will speak about the generation of Biermann battery fields in laser-plasma interactions and the interplay with the Weibel instability.

Over the past week, all the members of the epp team, along with other GoLP members, showcased their recent work in invited talks, oral contributions and posters, covering several areas of plasma physics, along with other fruitful and informal interactions with the leaders of the field that visited Lisbon for the EPS 2015.