Physics Colloquium

On April 11th, Marija Vranic was the speaker of the weekly Physics Colloquium, organized by the Physics Department of IST. This initiative has already received IPFN's president Dr. Bruno Gonçalves, on March 14th.

Marija is a Post-Doctoral fellow at IPFN, working in the Group of Lasers and Plasmas (GoLP), and the topic of her presentation was Extreme Laser-Matter Interactions, where she talked a bit about her current research.

'Using the most powerful lasers in the world, we can accelerate particles in a plasma, which may take us well beyond the current energy frontier. Apart from the tremendous potential for applications, having access to very energetic particles and extremely intense lasers at the same time will also allow answering some of the long-standing fundamental questions. Can we boil the vacuum with a field much lower than the Schwinger critical field of electrodynamics? What is the maximum field that can stably exist? We will discuss QED cascades that can create vast numbers of electron-positron pairs seeded by a single electron in an intense field much lower than the Schwinger limit. This can be tested with next generation of laser technology.' (in Physics Colloquium webpage)

We are looking forward to learn more about her research!