Happy Holidays to all our team members and friends! We look forward to another year of great science, friendship, and fun!

This years’ GoLP Day (December 15) was held near the Castelo de São Jorge, in Museu de Artes Decorativas. The programme included the Marshmallow Challenge, case studies on improving several aspects of GoLP’s life, visits to the Museum and the Workshops, and to the Castelo São Jorge, prizes (including official GoLP merchandise!), and lots of interactions and fun. 

On December 5, Joana successfully defended her PhD thesis in Physics entitled “Radiation processes in laser driven laboratory scenarios” at IST with the highest mark. The thesis committee was composed of Bob Bingham, Patric Muggli, Ricardo Fonseca, João M. Dias, Jorge Vieira and Luis OS. Many congratulations to Joana!

The new cluster Accelerates has been featured in the Intel Case Study “University of Lisbon: High-Performance Plasma Physics”. The new HPC cluster features almost 2000 cpu cores and it will be used to support the research of the team in the framework of the ERC Advanced Grant Accelerates. The HPC Cluster Accelerates has already entered the final stages of testing and it will be in production very soon. The Intel Case Study is available here.

Luis OS, Elisabetta, Joana, Marija, Diana, and Nitin attended the CERN Accelerator School on Plasma Wake Acceleration (23 – 29 Nov). For the first time, CERN hosted a school on Plasma Acceleration. The school has brought together the leaders of the field in Europe and more than 120 junior researchers for a week long of classes and case study sessions, exciting science, and many lively discussions at the CERN restaurant. More details on the school here.

The prizes for the winners of the image and video of 2014, the “natas” of visualization, were awarded today to Fabio Cruz (left) and to Paulo Alves (right), with the corresponding iPad Mini. Paulo and Fabio were joined by Thomas Grismayer (last year’s winner, center) and by the rest of GoLP to taste the “natas” of the “Natas”. As one of the 2014 winners (PA) 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.”

epp team members Ricardo Fonseca, Jorge Vieira, Thomas Grismayer, Kevin Schoeffler, Marija Vranic and Paulo Alves attended the Annual Meeting of the Division of Plasma Physics of the American Physical Society in New Orleans. Besides having fun and lively discussions with GoLP alumni and other friends and collaborators, there was also the opportunity to showcase our work in 6 talks and 4 posters.

Luis OS, Jorge V and Marija V attended the HELL DUR workshop of ELI Beamlines (invited contributions by Jorge and Marija). The workshop on HELL Experimental Platform – Detailed User Requirements Workshop was held close to the ELI Beamlines site (ELI building is in the back of the picture), near Prague in the Czech Republic.
 

Two new Idea Walls have just opened at GoLP. Painted with IdeaPaint these walls are ready to take on the creativity and the ideas at the tip of GoLPers’ dry eraser markers.
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epp team researchers have proposed a configuration to test radiation reaction in the radiation dominated regime which takes advantage of state-of-the-art laser systems currently available. The configuration has been explored with massively parallel simulations that take into account the effect of radiation reaction in the particle dynamics via the Landau-Lifshitz equation. This work has been published in Physical Review Letters by Marija Vranic et al. and can be found here.
The portuguese version of the press release is below:

Cientistas propõem teste experimental para a equação mais exótica da física clássica
Uma equipa de investigadores do IPFN/IST determinou as condições experimentais que poderão ser exploradas para testar uma das equações mais exóticas da física clássica,  a equação de Lorentz-Abraham-Dirac (LAD). Esta equação descreve a dinâmica de uma partícula carregada, como por exemplo um electrão, que, ao ser acelerada, perde uma parte importante da sua energia por radiação emitindo luz e…