Newsfrom our faculty members and students
Professor Marta Fajardo's work featured in Euronews
October 24 2017
VoXEL, and FET Open project led by Prof. Marta Fajardo, was featured in short program on Euronews first aired on October 16.
Doutor Bruno Gonçalves and Doutor Carlos Silva promoted to Investigador Principal
October 03 2017As a result of a recent international call for the recruitment of two researchers (permanent staff) in the area of Nuclear Fusion, Doutor Bruno Gonçalves and Doutor Carlos Silva have been promoted to Investigador Principal officially joining the Physics Department as permanent research faculty members. Many congratulations to Bruno Gonçalves and Carlos Silva on their promotion!
Paper by Professor João Pedro Bizarro highlighted in Europhysics News
July 13 2017A recent paper by IST physicists J. T. Mendonça and J. P. Bizarro [1] was selected for the highlights section of this month’s Europhysics News, the magazine of the European Physical Society. In their work, the authors explore the properties of twisted light beams inside a magnetized plasma. Twisted waves are light waves that carry angular orbital momentum (OAM), and whose wavefront spins as the wavepropagates. In plasma physics and many other areas, the study of twisted waves in general, and twisted laser beams in particular, has received considerable attention in recent years, leading to a number of new and unexpected effects. The authors have focused on the case of a twisted wave propagating in a magnetoplasma, finding a variety of solutions and providing a wave-kinetic description. They realized that such waves can be described as quasi-particles carrying an intrinsic OAM. They have also introduced a generalized concept of plasma turbulence, consisting of a gas of several types of such twisted quasi-particles. Bizarro, who is assistant professor at the IST Physics Department, says that “we can conceive an example of an application in which a single wave beam with no OAM propagating in a plasma, in the presence of a magnetic field, leads to a shower of higher order OAM modes". This new result will allow the extension to magnetised plasmas of previously identified applications for twisted waves, such as possible new configurations for electron and positron acceleration, laser-target interactions, or the amplification of laser pulses to high intensities via Raman and Brillouin decay. The work also established a wave-kinetic equation, describing the exchange of orbital-angular momentum between different modes in a turbulent plasma. 1. J. T. Mendonça and J. P. S. Bizarro, 'Twisted waves in a magnetized plasma', Plasma Phys. Control. Fusion 59, 054003 (2017); doi: 10.1088/1361-6587/aa6231
Professor Marta Fajardo's VOXEL lab featured on the IST website
July 10 2017The VOXEL lab has been recently featured on the IST Website (news in english, and in portuguese). VOXEL was funded as a H2020 FET (Future and Emerging Technologies) project, with Prof. Marta Fajardo as PI of the consortium, and aims to develop a new X-ray camera for 3D images with minimum radiation (see also news in FCT website).
Professor Luis Oliveira e Silva elected Fellow of the EPS
April 17 2017Prof. Luis Oliveira e Silva has been elected fellow of the European Physical Society at the last meeting of the EPS Council. His citation reads "For his outstanding theoretical and numerical contributions in laser plasma interaction in the relativistic regime". In 2017, the EPS elected three new fellows, increasing the total number of fellows to 85. Luis Oliveira e Silva is the first Portuguese physicist elected to fellow status. The EPS was founded in 1968, with 42 national "EPS Member Societies" and 2500 individual members, representing more than 120,000 members all over Europe.