Samuel M, epp/GoLP alumnus now at Microsoft in Seattle, was interviewed by Luis OS for a joint initiative of the MEFT coordination and NFIST, where he shared inspirational thoughts on his path from Tecnico to the world. The video of the interview is available here.

Tomorrow’s Laser-Plasma Accelerator Seminar, at GSI, will be given by EPP member Miguel P. The seminar will be on Tuesday at 1.30pm GMT (2.30am CET) via Zoom. The talk will be entitled “Radiative reflection: high frequency radiation emission using evanescent light waves in plasma mirrors”, and will focus on RaDiO and on producing high frequency radiation using low power lasers.
More information about the talk here.

The next edition of the Les Houches plasma physics school will be co-organized by EPP researcher Thomas G and Mickael Grech (LULI, France) in May 2023. The school was planned to occur in 2021, but it was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Les Houches plasma physics school is typically organized every two years at Les Houches, in the beautiful Chamonix Valley in the french Alps, gathering a group of renowned lecturers in plasma physics. Space, astrophysical as well as laboratory plasmas will be considered with a special emphasis on the timely topic of plasmas under extreme conditions as found e.g. in the interior of planets, in the most violent astrophysical environments, or created using extreme-light lasers.
EPP students and lecturers have participated in previous editions of this school in 2013, 2015, and 2019.

The joint European project Effort toward a Highly Productive Programming Environment for Heterogeneous Exascale Computing (EPEEC) has conducted a test on the effective advantages of task-based parallel programming models using ZPIC as a reference High-Performance Computing (HPC) application for kinetic plasma simulations. The results from this test show a path for alternative high-efficiency parallelization of the PIC algorithm that can be straightforwardly applied in many novel architectures, including FPGA and GPGPU based accelerators.
Different task-based implementations of ZPIC have been developed based on the OmpSs-2 programming model and their performance was tested on two classical test plasma physics problems: laser wakefield acceleration and the Weibel instability. Some of the implementations demonstrated near-perfect scaling for 48 cores despite unbalanced conditions, an impressive result accomplished while retaining the code simplicity of task-based programming. More details of this study can be found here.
EPEEC’s main goal is to…

EPP member Marija V was selected by the Lisbon Academy of Sciences to join the Young Scientists Seminar (SJC), in the field of Sciences. The SJC is part of the Institute of High Studies of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences and aims to maintain a link between the Academy and young scientists of exceptional merit in order to stimulate the discussion of socially and scientifically relevant issues through the implementation of activities, such as conferences, colloquia, etc. See Técnico news for more info and for quotes from Marija on this distinction.

Next week’s seminar at University of Rochester will be given by EPP member Jorge V. The seminar will be on Wednesday 24 February 2021 at 2.30pm GMT (9.30am ET) via Zoom. The talk will be entitled “Broadband superradiance with less than a particle per wavelength”, and will focus on findings presented in a recent paper published in Nature Physics.

Marija V is scheduled to give the Oxford ALP seminar, on Monday, Feb 15th, 12:30 CET (11:30 GMT).
The topic of the talk is “Radiation-dominated electron acceleration in plasma channels using extremely intense light”.
More information here.

GoLP is celebrating the international day of Women in Science by launching a Women in Physics group led by Camilla Willim, Marija Vranic, Mariana Moreira and Chiara Badiali. The primary goal of this group is forming and strengthening connections between PhD students at IST across different physics disciplines. Other initiatives will include outreach, coaching and connection with role-model female scientists through formal and informal events. This group’s activities will complement the efforts of Gender Balance @ Técnico, that has been active for the past few years.

The article “Seeded QED cascades in counter-propagating laser pulses” published in Physical Review E in 2017 by Thomas G, Marija V, Joana M, Ricardo F and Luis OS has been selected for a Physical Review E (PRE) Spotlight on Laser-created Pair Plasmas. Each PRE Spotlight represents a small selection of articles, dealing with the same research area. The article provides an exhaustive study about the growth rates of QED cascades in counter-propagating lasers. In addition to the new analytical work developed by the authors, all recent existing theoretical models for the growth rate from other authors are shown and compared to first-principles QED-PIC simulations. A discussion about the cascade’s threshold is included, based on the analytical and numerical results. The paper is available here.

A recent paper in Physics of Plasmas by EPP members Bernardo M and Jorge V and collaborators at Rochester University, USA, entitled “Laser-plasma acceleration beyond wave breaking” has been selected by the editors of Physics of Plasmas as a featured article. This paper discusses how superluminal plasma wakefields prevent wave-breaking of strongly nonlinear plasma waves in the blowout regime and thus self-injection of electrons into the plasma wake. This leads to enhanced and cleaner accelerating fields. Our finding could be an important step to further reduce the size and improve the quality of future plasma based accelerators.