Newsfrom our faculty members and students
MIT project granted to faculties V Guerra and T Silva
December 15 2021Vasco Guerra and Tiago Silva were awarded a 50k€ grant for their exploratory proposal "plasma-assisted CO2 Recycling: from EArth TO maRs" (CREATOR), funded in the framework of the MIT-Portugal programme.
CREATOR consists of a systematic theoretical, modelling and simulation investigation, with the purpose of investigating CO2 plasma dissociation and plasma-surface interactions relevant for product separation. The final goal is to define the optimal conditions for a plasma reactor to operate for both Terrestrial and Martian CO2 recycling applications. It builds on the Seed Project "Inverse design and Modeling of Plasma-Assisted CO2-conversion Technologies" (IMPACT) financed in the 2021 MIT-Portugal call. The Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics from the MIT joins the project as a Participating Institution.
The project focuses on nanosecond pulsed discharges ignited in pure CO2, operating both at high (Earth) and low (Mars) pressure, to be investigated at the MIT in the framework of IMPACT. The different working pressures imply a modification of the dominant energy transfer pathways, from direct electron impact processes to a plasma chemistry mediated by vibrationally and electronically excited states.
CREATOR will contribute to enable new plasma-based technologies for CO2 conversion, which can contribute to mitigate fossil fuel consumption on Earth, and can play a key role in human exploration beyond Earth, by enabling the production of fuel and breathable oxygen on Mars.
Project of European Innovation Council granted to faculty Marta Fajardo
December 06 2021The NanoXCAN project, coordinated by Professor Marta Fajardo, was recommended for funding (€4 million) in the highly-competitive Pathfinder Open program (6% success rate) of the European Innovation Council (EIC). The NanoXCAN team, including researchers from IST/IPFN, the École Polytechnique and the Leibniz University Hannover, intends to develop a nanoscale virus imaging X-ray microscope.
The characterization of viral structures and the identification of key proteins involved in each step of the cycle of infection are crucial to developing treatments. Yet imaging single viruses can only be performed in a few specialized centres in Europe. NanoXCAN proposes to develop a tabletop virus imaging X-ray microscope, to be accesible in every hospital, with foreseeable impact as revolutionary as the invention of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy, paving the way towards the determination of the structure and dynamics of matter to a large community.
The project brings together two recent innovations: the possibility of generating very bright and small X-ray sources, in an optimized process using artificial intelligence; and an advance in the diffraction imaging technique that allows the use of conventional X-ray sources – as opposed to the coherent sources of such large infrastructures.
More information here
Mario Galletti wins Best PhD thesis award by SPOF
November 26 2021Former APPLAuSE student Mario Galletti has received the award for the Best PhD Thesis in Optics and Photonics in Portugal, 2020, sponsored by the Portuguese Society for Optics and Photonics – SPOF.
The thesis, entitled “High contrast front-end for a petawatt laser system designed for electron acceleration & High-intensity laser-matter applications towards advanced compact particle accelerators” was supervised by Prof. Gonçalo Figueira (IPFN/Physics Dept., Instituto Superior Tecnico, Universidade de Lisboa) and Dr. Marco Galimberti (Central Laser Facility, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK).
Mario, now a researcher at INFN in Italy, had already been among the four winners of this year's editions of the Best Thesis Award from the EPS Division of Plasma Physics.
Congratulations Mario!
ESA project granted to faculties V Guerra and T Silva
November 23 2021Vasco Guerra, Tiago Silva and also Nuno Pinhão were awarded 175k€ from the European Space Agency (ESA) to build, together with teams from DIFFER (Dutch Institute For Fundamental Energy Research, The Netherlands) and LPP (Laboratoire de Physique des Plasmas, Ecole Polytechnique, France), a proof-of-concept prototype to decompose carbon dioxide directly from the Martian atmosphere.
The funding was awarded to the project “ISRU on Mars: Plasma conversion of CO2 from the Martian atmosphere”, headed by Vasco Guerra, in the scope of ESA's Initial Support for Innovation mechanism. The research team is also in close contact with a group from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), via project IMPACT, recently financed in the framework of the MIT-Portugal programme.
The knowledge acquired to develop ISRU for the production of propellants and life support commodities on Mars will also make life on Earth more productive, clean, and sustainable. It will contribute to improving CO2 utilization technologies on Earth, fostering the transition to renewable energy.
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Plasmas faculty among the best scientists in the world according to Stanford study
November 18 2021Professors Vasco Guerra, Luís Oliveira e Silva and Luís Lemos Alves are among the 124 Técnico researchers included in the lists of highly cited researchers worldwide, falling within the top 2% in their respective fields, according to a new study led by Stanford University. The selected authors are presented in the article entitled A standardized citation metrics author database annotated for scientific field, published in the journal PLOS Biology.
The article is based on standardized citation metrics, with the purpose of combating abuse of self-citation, and the number of citations allows to assess the impact and consolidated influence of a given scientist or institution in the progress of scientific knowledge. The first version was published in 2019, aiming to create a database of more than 100,000 scientists, available to the public. Since then, the publication is updated every year (the last update used Scopus database until August 2021).
The ranking covers 22 major fields and 176 subfields. As in previous years, separate data are shown for career-long impact and single-year impact.
Congratulations !
More details here