Newsfrom our faculty members and students
Professor Jorge Vieira hired as Assistant Professor
August 02 2019As of September 2019, Professor Jorge Vieira has been hired as Assistant Professor of Physics. Professor Jorge Vieira was previously an "Investigador FCT". His research is focused on advanced computing and theoretical modelling to exploit the properties of structured, intense light and to attain the ultimate physical limits of plasma accelerators and associated light sources, envisioning beam phase spaces tailored for specific applications. View more
Professor Luís Lemos Alves and Professor Gonçalo Figueira distinguished as "Docentes Excelentes IST 2017/2018"
August 02 2019Professor Luís Lemos Alves and Professor Gonçalo Figueira have been distinguished as "Docentes Excelentes 2017/2018". This distinction, aimed at promoting teaching excellence, is based on the students' feedback to the courses taught in the academic year 2017/2018, for the courses "Eletromagnetismo e Óptica" and "Termodinâmica e Estrutura da Matéria" (Professor Luís L. Alves) and "Óptica e Lasers" (Professor Gonçalo Figueira)
New books on Electromagnetism and Optics by Jorge Loureiro
August 02 2019Jorge Loureiro, a longtime IPFN member now retired, has launched a new book on Electromagnetism and Optics (in Portuguese), edited by IST Press. The book is organised into two volumes: a handbook (680 pages) and an exercise book (320 pages). The book launch was held at Instituto Superior Técnico, the 21st of February. Jorge Loureiro develops his research in low-temperature plasmas of atomic and molecular gases. He authored and co-authored almost a hundred papers and a number of books. During his teaching career, he also taught courses on Classical Electrodynamics, Plasma Physics, Gas Discharges, and Atomic and Molecular Plasma Physics. This book reflects Prof. Loureiro’s long scientific and pedagogical experience in teaching these courses at IST for more than 30 years. It is a comprehensive work suitable both for self-study or for accompanying a university-level course. Apart from the core concepts, each chapter is complemented by a number of appendices dealing with advanced concepts.
2018 Nobel Prize in Physics celebrates lasers
October 11 2018This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was shared between Gérard Mourou (École Polytechnique, France), Donna Strickland (University of Waterloo, Canada) and Arthur Ashkin (Bell Laboratories, USA). The work of the first two winners, who were awarded half the prize, consisted of the invention of the Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA) technique in the mid-1980s, which enabled increasing the power of ultrashort lasers to previously unattainable levels.
Thanks to their invention, ultrashort, ultraintense lasers have become ubiquitous, paving the way for applications ranging from dermatology to ophthalmology and from laser acceleration to pulsed X-ray generation and laboratory astrophysics.
DF congratulates the winners, whose work has been seminal to the development of high-intensity lasers and laser-plasma interaction, and celebrates their achievement. The award-winning Gérard Mourou is a long time collaborator of faculty members of DF.
Prof. Luís Silva, and Prof. Marta Fajardo worked together with Mourou on the genesis of the ELI Project - Extreme Light Infrastructure, started in 2005, with the goal of building in Europe the most powerful laser system in the world. Together with Mourou, they co-authored the ELI White Paper.
The researchers also led several work-packages of this Project, such as the International Communication (M. Fajardo). In 2010, the decision was taken to coordinate the ELI Project in three poles, which have been set up in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, which are now entering the operational phase. Marta Fajardo is part, with Gérard Mourou, of the International Commission of Scientific and Technical Advice of ELI.
IST, through GoLP/IPFN operates several high-intensity laser systems at its IST facilities, based on the CPA technique invented by Mourou and Strickland. In fact, this technique is now used in all high-intensity laser installations, which testifies to its long-lasting impact on laser physics.
Prof. Gonçalo Figueira, a specialist in the CPA technique, built and installed the first CPA laser in Portugal in 1998, having developed others since then. Prof. Luís Silva uses numerical methods to simulate the use of these lasers for particle acceleration and to exploit plasmas under extreme conditions. Prof. Marta Fajardo has expanded the CPA concept to the X-ray lasers domain, proposing and demonstrating the CPA-X technique using lasers in plasmas and free electron lasers.
The Laboratory for Intense Lasers and the VOXEL station are two experimental facilities run by Prof. Gonçalo Figueira and Prof. Marta Fajardo that makes extensive use of the CPA technique. At these labs, tens of young researchers have been trained and joined the ranks of science thanks to this extraordinary invention.
DF celebrates this very extraordinary recognition for lasers and laser-plasma interaction and hopes that it may inspire other young researchers to contribute to this fascinating area of physics.
AWAKE accelerates electrons with IST team
September 03 2018In a paper published in the journal Nature, the AWAKE collaboration at CERN, which includes the teams of Prof. Luis O. Silva and Prof. Jorge Vieira, reports the first ever successful acceleration of electrons using a wave generated by protons zipping through a plasma. The acceleration obtained over a given distance is already several times higher than that of conventional technologies currently available for particle accelerators. First proposed in the 1970s, the use of plasma waves (or so called wakefields) has the potential to drastically reduce the size of accelerators in the next several decades. The image, by Prof. Jorge Vieira, illustrates the concept: the proton beam breaks up in small beamlets (yellow), that drive a plasma wave and the corresponding electric field (blue isosurfaces), that accelerate the co-propagating electrons (small spheres, where color is proportional to the energy of the electrons). AWAKE, which stands for "Advanced WAKEfield Experiment", is a proof-of-principle compact accelerator project for accelerating electrons to very high energies over short distances. Accelerating particles to greater energies over shorter distances is crucial to achieving high-energy collisions that physicists use to probe the fundamental laws of nature, and may also prove to be important in a wide range of industrial and medical applications.