Nuno Loureiro wins 2015 Thomas H. Stix Award
What do satellite communications, manned space missions, and nuclear fusion reactors have in common? All these processes are strongly dependent on a complex phenomenon called magnetic reconnection, whose study earned IPFN researcher Nuno Loureiro a prestigious award from the American Physical Society.
Nuno investigated magnetic reconnection as the mechanism that causes solar flares, leading to a new paradigm for understanding them. "Solar flares", he says", are not only intrinsically interesting but they also play a key role in the so-called 'space weather', whose understanding is critical for manned space missions and the stability of communication networks and satellites."
However, the work for which he was awarded goes beyond this application: "Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental and ubiquitous phenomena in magnetized plasmas. For instance, the success of nuclear fusion by magnetic confinement, of which the ITER is the current flagship - depends critically on understanding magnetic reconnection".
The Thomas H. Stix Early Career Award for Outstanding Contributions to Plasma Physics Research comes with a money prize of two thousand dollars. It aims to recognize an individual researcher who has made outstanding contributions in plasma physics early in their career, up to 10 years after completing a PhD degree. The formal award will take place at the annual meeting of the Plasma Physics Division of the American Physical Society, to be held in November in Savannah, Georgia.
Nuno Loureiro is a graduate in Physics Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST, 2000) and obtained his doctorate in physics at Imperial College London in 2005. He did post-doctoral studies at Princeton University, USA and the Culham Center for Fusion Energy, UK. He returned to Portugal in the scope of the Ciência programme in 2008 and joined IPFN, where he currently heads the Theory and Modeling Group.
