Luís Oliveira e Silva awarded ERC Advanced Grant
Luís Oliveira e Silva was awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) worth 1.6 MEuro in the latest edition of this competition, for his project “Accelerates”. Luís coordinates IPFN’s Group for Lasers and Plasmas (GoLP) and is an Associate Professor at the Physics Department of IST.
ERC Advanced Grants allow exceptional established research leaders in any field of science, engineering and scholarship to pursue frontier research of their choice. They aim to encourage risk-taking and interdisciplinarity, and supports pioneering frontier research project
Luís’s team at GoLP aims to investigate the processes involved in particle acceleration in relativistic shocks through numerical simulations using the world’s most powerful supecomputers. It is believed that acceleration in relativistic shocks is responsible for the generation of cosmic rays, the most energetic particles in the universe, but until now these acceleration mechanisms remain unknown.
The work now funded by the Advanced Grant will consist in the exploration of the physics underlying the shock formation and the acceleration of particles in the process. It is also expected that the findings will lead to the possibility of experimentally reproducing the acceleration mechanisms in the laboratory.
