APPLAuSE

Tiago C Dias awarded at GEC

Tiago C. Dias, a member of N-PRiME/IPFN and a PhD student in the APPLAuSE program, was awarded the Student Award for Excellence at the 76th Gaseous Electronics Conference (GEC), organized by the American Physical Society (APS) in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.

Tiago Dias was selected as one of the six finalists for this award, based on his significant contributions during the PhD (V. Guerra, supervisor). The final prize was awarded following his presentation "Unified Monte Carlo Formulation of Nanosecond Discharges. Tiago's Monte Carlo formulation has significantly improved the understanding of plasma dynamics, eliminating common approximations that impact the quality of results.

The GEC Student Award for Excellence encourages and recognizes the important contributions students make to the GEC and the field of low-temperature plasma science. The award is composed by a cash prize and a certificate.

Congratulations Tiago !

Tiago C Dias awarded at ICPIG

Tiago C Dias, member of N-PRiME/IPFN and PhD student of the APPLAuSE programme, was awarded a poster prize at the XXXVth International Conference on Phenomena in Ionized Gases (ICPIG).

The awards were granted to four PhD students, and consisted of diplomas and cash prizes for each student.

Tiago C Dias was awarded for his communication entitled "A reaction mechanism for oxygen plasmas", coauthored by C. Fromentin, L. L. Alves, A. Tejero-del-Caz, T. Silva and V. Guerra.

Congratulations Tiago

Rogério Jorge obtains PhD Research Award from EPS

APPLAuSE student Rogério Jorge was awarded one of the European Physical Society (EPS) Plasma Physics Division PhD Research Award of its 2020 edition. The prize recognizes truly outstanding research achievements associated with a PhD study in the broad field of plasma physics. Up to four prizes are given annually to young scientists from the 38 European countries associated with the EPS.

Rogério’s thesis is entitled “A moment-based model for plasma dynamics at arbitrary collisionality” and was supervised by Prof. Paolo Ricci (Swiss Plasma Center, EPFL) and Prof. Nuno Loureiro (currently at MIT, formerly at IPFN/IST), in the scope of a joint PhD degree between EPFL and IST. At the end of 2019, Rogério had already been awarded the EPFL Physics Doctoral Thesis Award for his work.

He worked on one of the most important issues faced by the fusion community, namely the understanding of the plasma turbulent dynamics in the tokamak edge, where the plasma temperature decreases from values as high as ten times the temperature in the core of the Sun to the room temperature of the wall. He provided a seminal contribution to the development of a model that will allow the numerical simulation of this challenging region.

Within APPLAuSE, Rogério was a member and the delegate of the 2015-2019 class. He pursued the Bachelor and Master’s in Engineering Physics at IST, and his joint PhD was a continuation of the Master’s Thesis work developed at EPFL with the title ‘Simulation of Plasma Blobs in Realistic Tokamak Geometry’, a collaboration between IPFN and CRPP. His research interests besides Nuclear Fusion includes the Study of Meyers-Perry Black Holes and Physics of Music – Non-linear Acoustics.

After his PhD he moved to the USA, where he is now a postdoctoral associate at the University of Maryland’s Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics.

Congratulations Rogério!

APPLAuSE Review Letters, 2018 Edition

Welcome to the first issue of our students’ journal! APPLAUSE Review Letters is a peer-refereed academic journal on Advances on Plasma Physics, resulting from an intensive module on Transverse Skills, a course designed to improve the APPLAUSE students academic achievement.

The papers presented in the APPLAUSE Review Letters show review work on selected topics or advances made during the Laboratory Rotations hosted by the IPFN teams. These papers were presented as part of the summer assignment for the course and refereed by IPFN students and senior researchers from IPFN.

You can access the journal here.

Gulbenkian prize granted to Fábio Cruz

Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation announced last week the winners of the 2016 edition of the Young Researchers Incentive Programme. Fábio Cruz was awarded by his work in the thematic area of Science of the Earth and Space, in which he presented the project “Multiscale Modeling of Pulsar Magnetospheres”. In this project, Fábio will model pulsar magnetospheres – one the most extreme and exotic environments in the Universe – using advanced numerical tools, capable of solving the self-consistent collective dynamics of the electron-positron (e-e+) plasmas surrounding these compact astronomical objects. Moreover, by resorting to ab initio massively parallel simulations, it will be possible to model, for the first time, the formation process of the e-e+ cascades in the vacuum gaps of pulsar magnetospheres due to quantum electrodynamical (QED) processes in a realistic geometry.

The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation established the Young Researchers Incentive Programme with the aim of stimulating the creativity and quality of scientific research among the younger generation. The Program is intended for young researchers under the age of 26 who work in Portuguese institutions. The prize has a monetary value of € 12,500, of which €2,500 goes to the researcher and €10,000 to the host Institution where the research will be carried out.

27th SPPT EPS Poster Prize awarded to Ana Dias

Ana Dias has been awarded the EPS Poster Prize of the 27th Symposium on Plasma Physics and Technology (SPPT), with the contribution entitled “Graphene production and functionalization using plasma-based methods”.

Ana Dias is a PhD student of PD-F “Advanced Programme in Plasma Science and Engineering” (APPLAuSE), with Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear (IPFN) and the Physics Department.

The EPS Poster Prize of the SPPT is granted to researchers in the PhD phase of his/her career in recognition of an excellent poster at the conference. The poster is evaluated by its scientific content, design and presentation to the evaluation committee.