“Solid, liquid, or gas? What is the state of matter of the stars?”
Introducing the concept of plasma, and finally guiding us toward the enigma of the pulsars, check out the news piece at SIC, with Luís O. Silva.

The AWAKE Collaboration, of which GoLP members Ricardo Fonseca, Nelson Lopes, Mariana Moreira, Jorge Vieira, Luis O. Silva, and Nuno Torrado are part, has published today an “Analysis of proton bunch parameters in the AWAKE experiment“, in the Journal of Instrumentation. This work offers a precise characterization of the incoming proton bunch parameters, crucial to accurately simulate one of the most important parts of the AWAKE experiment: the self-modulation process.

EPP GoLP member awarded second place in the APS DPP 2021 Visual Science Communication contest during the 63rd Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics, held in a hybrid format on November 8-12 2021.
Pablo J. Bilbao was awarded the 2nd place video award in the APS DPP 2021 Visual Science Communication. The video featured the research presented in his poster during the conference, with the title a self-consistent study of the electron cyclotron maser instability as a source of coherent radiation.
 

 
EPP team members Marija Vranic and Oscar Amaro have recently published their work “Optimal laser focusing for positron production in laser–electron scattering”  on New Journal of Physics.
Marija and Óscar extend the analytical scaling laws previously developed for electron interaction with a plane wave to more realistic geometries, resulting in a fast parameter optimization process that can save computing resources. Their study has important applications in real-time optimization and data analysis in experiments.

On the 21st of October, the EPP member Fábio Cruz has successfully defended his PhD thesis with the title “Multiscale modeling of pulsar magnetospheres”.
Fábio’s work was approved with the top mark of Distinction and Honors.
The defense has taken place in a hybrid mode. His thesis committee was composed by Ilidio Lopes (IST), Anatoly Spitkovsky (Princeton), Benoit Cerruti (Grenoble), and Thomas Grismayer (IST), and was presided by Luis Lemos Alves (IST).
Many Congratulations to Fábio and all the best wishes for his career and future!
 

EPP team members Marija Vranic and Jorge Vieira were awarded with a total of 68 million core-hours at the TIER-0 supercomputer Marenostrum, at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. The computing time was awarded by the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) during the 23rd call, and were selected amongst 61 submitted proposals. The project “Direct laser acceleration of leptons in plasma” was awarded with 36 million core-hours (PI: MV). This project will be dedicated to investigate advanced positron sources for plasma-based accelerators based on nonlinear QED processes. The project “Acceleration control and superradiance in laser-plasma accelerators” was awarded with 32 million core-hours (PI: JV). This project will be dedicated to investigate coherent x-ray emission and acceleration in laser-plasma accelerators. 

EPP member Ricardo Fonseca’s invited talk for the student organization FusionEPtalks, with the title of “The ZPIC educational code suit”, is now available on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5vMwLHdefc
ZPIC’s main goal is to assist the study and understanding of plasma physics using computer simulations.
This self-contained and fully relativistic electromagnetic code requires only a C compiler. The output files are written in a new file format called ZDF that can be easily read using the supplied routines in a number of languages, such as Python, Matlab, and IDL. If available, a Python environment can be used to control the simulations and visualize code output.
To be updated on the latest news on ZPIC follow the GitHub page:
https://github.com/ricardo-fonseca/zpic

The work “Stable positron acceleration in thin, warm, hollow plasma channels” by EPP team members Thales S and Jorge V, by EPP team alumni Diana A, and collaborators in the US (Mike Downer, Mark Hogan, Vitaly Yakimenko and Rafal Zgadzaj) was recently accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters. In this work, Thales et al. propose a novel regime for positron acceleration, which may deliver high quality positron bunches free from deleterious instabilities in experiments.

EPP team member Marija V won, as PI, a ~€250k research grant in the physics panel for the project titled “Positron sources based on ultra-intense lasers”. The grant is awarded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) on a nation-wide competitive call, where the proposal was ranked among the top 5%. The research and development funding is allocated for three years.

At the closing session of the 47th EPS Plasma Physics Conference (fully virtual), Prof. Richard Dendy announced that Camilla W was one of the winners of the PPCF/EPS/IUPAP PhD poster prizes. She received the award for presenting her project with the title “Target Normal Sheath Acceleration with shaped lasers”.