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.

GoLP has signed an MoU with the Center for Relativistic Laser Science of the Institute for Basic Sciences of South Korea, during the visit of Prof. Chang Hee Nam, the director of CoReLS, to Lisbon. The MoU aims to strength the collaboration between the groups on high intensity laser matter interactions.

Our recent paper on the spatio-temporal theory of the current filamentation instability by V.B. Pathak et al published in the New Journal of Physics has been selected by the editors as IOP Select. These are the articles from the last 12 months that have been chosen by the editors for their novelty, significance and potential impact on future research.

Luis OS will present the talk “In Silico Plasmas Under Extreme Intensities” at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory Colloquium on May 12, 2015. More information is available here.

In collaboration with physicists from Laboratoire d’Optique Apliquée (LOA), EPP researchers have tested a model for the origin of large-scale magnetic fields in the universe. The origin of magnetic fields in astrophysics is an outstanding scientific mystery, which has been investigated using powerful telescopes that probe our universe. Observations from telescopes can be viewed as data from experiments whose initial conditions cannot be controlled and tuned by human beings. In order to face this limitation, researchers have recently begun to reproduce astrophysical conditions under controlled environments in the laboratory. EPP team members Jorge Vieira and Luís Silva and LOA researchers have now used intense lasers in plasmas to test a model for the origin of cosmic magnetic fields in the laboratory. The work involving experiments, theory and simulations was published in Nature Physics and can be found here.