Posts tagged with ‘Prizes and Awards’

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. 

The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) awarded 25 Million core-hours to a EPP researchers team lead by T. Grismayer to explore in the laboratory pair-dominated plasmas under the presence of ultra-intense fields and mimicking extreme astrophysical scenarios resorting to the unprecedented power of future laser facilities. This proposal aims to exploit the unique computing facilities provided by PRACE to address these exciting challenges by leveraging on the recently pioneered advances on ab initio simulations of quantum electrodynamics (QED) effects in extreme plasmas with particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. Another key goal of this proposal is to investigate the radiation signatures in the Compton Regime, a regime that is not accessible with standard electromagnetic methods.

Paulo Alves has been awarded the ENAA Outstanding Talk Prize at the “XXIV National Meeting of Astronomy and Astrophysics” organized by the Portuguese Society of Astronomy held in Porto (July 17-18, 2014). Paulo presented his latest results on large-scale magnetic field generation via electron-scale instabilities in unmagnetized shear flows.

The IUPAP General Relativity and Gravitation Young Scientist Prize 2014 was awarded to Jorge Santos, epp team alumni (2002-2005). This is one of the most prestigious prizes for young scientists working in General Relativity. Jorge concluded his MSc at IST in 2005 on parametric instabilities driven by white light, from which resulted two papers (Physical Review Letters and Journal of Mathematical Physics). Jorge is now a Lecturer in Cambridge University, on leave at Stanford University.

The Partership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) awarded 45 Million core-hours to a EPP researchers team lead by J. Vieira to explore ultra-relativistic beam plasma interactions from miniatured plasma based accelerators to extreme astrophysical conditions. This proposal then aims at exploiting our simulation infrastructure to advance knowledge of next-generation plasma based accelerators driven by ultra-relativistic lepton and hadron bunches. This award is critical to address key open challenges of proton driven plasma wakefield acceleration experiments at CERN and for the design of lepton self-modulation experiments at SLAC. Another key aim of this award is to explore new plasma physics phenomena relevant for astrophysics and to investigate novel configurations allowing to mimic extreme astrophysical conditions in the laboratory.

 
PhD student Paulo Alves has been awarded one of this year’s Gulbenkian Prizes for Stimulus to Scientific Research, in the area of Physics/Advanced Materials, with his work “Ab initio nonlinear electromagnetic metamaterials”.
Paulo’s research centers on the exciting new field of electromagnetic metamaterials: artificial materials which can bend and manipulate light in extraordinary ways. These materials can be engineered to produce exotic effects, like guiding light around an object rendering it invisible, or even focusing light beyond the limits of conventional lenses, acting as a super lens.
The remarkable properties of metamaterials have attracted a great deal of scientific and technological interest. “I am interested in understanding how light behaves under very bizarre conditions found in metamaterials, like negative refraction, from a fundamental level”, says Paulo. “In particular, I would like to understand how high intensity light interacts with metamaterials, to investigate nonlinear effects in unusual conditions”.
 

 
Figure: Cherenkov emission…

PhD candidate Frederico Fiuza (GoLP/IPFN), won the 2011 Oscar Buneman Award for Best Scientific Visualization, delivered at the 22nd International Conference on Numerical Simulation of Plasmas, held recently in New Jersey, USA .
The Oscar Buneman Award, created in memory of one of the pioneers of numerical simulation of plasmas, is awarded every two years to the scientific visualization work that best contributes to the understanding of plasma physics.
This year’s winning work illustrates for the first time the possibility of studying in the laboratory extreme astrophysical scenarios associated with relativistic shock waves and the acceleration of cosmic rays. These impressive natural events can be reproduced through the interaction of intense lasers with plasmas.
Shock waves are perturbations that move faster than the speed of sound in a given environment. In astrophysics, they can even reach speeds approaching the speed of light – for instance, during the violent explosion of massive stars,…

O investigador Frederico Fiúza do Instituto de Plasma e Fusão Nuclear (IPFN) do Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) foi galardoado com o “Seed of Science” Júnior de 2012. Os prémios “Seed of Science” são atribuídos anualmente pelo jornal Ciência Hoje homenageando cientistas em diversas áreas como forma de reconhecimento e incentivo.
Frederico Fiúza está a realizar o seu trabalho de doutoramento no Grupo de Lasers e Plasmas do IPFN, e estuda, entre outras coisas, a possibilidade de usar a interacção de lasers intensos com plasmas (alvo sólido ou gasoso ionizado) para gerar feixes de iões de elevada qualidade com aplicações em medicina, nomeadamente em radioterapia de tumores profundos.
No seu dia-a-dia o investigador do IST recorre a simulações numéricas de grande escala, usando os maiores supercomputadores do mundo, para estudar estes sistemas e optimizá-los de forma a que no futuro possam ser uma realidade, diminuído de forma considerável o custo e a…