The Portuguese Science Foundation featured on their website the recent paper in Science Advances by Pablo B et al, highlighting the importance of the computational resources of Deucallion, with statements from Pablo B, Thales S and Luis OS.

PhD student Filipe C was awarded one of the Fulbright Portugal 2025/2026 PhD scholarships for research activities in U.S. institutions. This support will allow him to spend 6 months at the Plasma Simulation Group of the University of California, Los Angeles, where he will be collaborating with Prof. Warren Mori to study whether the incoherent properties of light could mitigate the laser-plasma instabilities that compromise Inertial Confinement Fusion.

 
 

In an article recently featured on the cover of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team of researchers from the University of Oxford (Robert J. Ewart, Michael L. Nastac, Alexander A. Schekochihin) and from GoLP/IPFN (Pablo B, Thales S, Luís OS) uncovered how collisionless plasmas relax to equilibrium under the action of turbulence.
While collisional plasmas achieve Maxwellian distributions through particle collisions, the study shows that in collisionless plasmas, turbulent dynamics alone drive relaxation toward universal, but non-Maxwellian, equilibria featuring power-law energy distributions. Theoretical predictions were confirmed through large-scale numerical simulations performed by the GoLP team, which captured the turbulent cascade and the progressive erosion of phase-space conservation over time. These results reveal that turbulence can induce a gradual loss of memory of the plasma’s initial state, leading to the emergence of universal equilibria determined by the nature of the turbulent mixing.
This work advances…

In a recent paper in Science Advances, Pablo B, Thales S, and Luis OS show that radiatively cooled relativistic plasmas can spontaneously emit coherent, polarized radiation via the maser instability. This is a universal feature of relativistically hot plasmas embedded in ultra strong magnetic fields, such as plasmas in the magnetospheres of neutron stars, and should also be observable in laboratory conditions. The paper was also featured in a long story in the national newspaper Publico (.pt) and at the IST website .(.en)

In a recent Letter in Physical Review D, selected for the Physics newsmagazine of the American Physical Society and as Editor’s Suggestion, a team of researchers of GoLP (Nitin S, now at CINECA, Kevin S, now in Bochum U, and Luis OS), established a new strong bound on dark electromagnetism, the equivalent of electromagnetism to dark mattter. Dark matter and its properties are at the core of some of the most fundamental questions in physics and the present work shows that plasma physics inspired models and simulations can help constrain some of the properties of dark matter.
The simplest model for an electromagnetic-like interaction in the dark sector is equivalent to the electromagnetic interaction between opposite dark charge identical mass particles i.e. dark electromagnetism. Under this hypothesis, dark matter can behave like a cold collisionless plasma of self-interacting dark matter particles, and exhibit plasma-like instabilities with observational consequences.The…

Jorge Vieira, an IPFN researcher and Associate Professor in the Physics Department at Instituto Superior Técnico, has reached an important milestone in his academic journey by successfully completing his Aggregation in Physics. The two-day examination took place on January 13th and 14th, 2025, at IST.
The exam featured two main components: a Curricular Unit Report on the Introduction to Plasma Physics course and a seminar titled “Plasma-based Accelerators and Light Sources: An Overview from the Past to the Future.” Prof. Luís Lemos Alves led the jury with other distinguished members including Peter Norreys, Caterina Riconda, Brigitte Cros, and Frederico Fiúza.
This achievement highlights Jorge’s commitment and significant contributions to plasma physics, particularly in the field of plasma-based particle accelerators and innovative laser pulses.
Congratulations, Jorge!
 

The project Realistic Simulations of Relativistic Plasmas in Astrophysical and Laboratory Environments, led by GoLP researchers Thales Silva and Pablo Bilbao, has been awarded 30 million CPU core hours on the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer through the Rede Nacional de Computação Avançada. This allocation will support cutting-edge research into the behavior of relativistic plasmas under extreme conditions, with applications to both astrophysical phenomena and laboratory experiments.
Relativistic plasmas, commonly found near compact astrophysical objects such as pulsars and magnetars, play a central role in producing coherent radiation and mediating the interaction of particles with intense magnetic fields. These processes are critical to understanding phenomena like Fast Radio Bursts and pulsar emissions. The awarded resources will also aid in studying similar dynamics in high-intensity laser-plasma experiments, enabling controlled investigations of these extreme conditions in the laboratory.
This project integrates astrophysical theory, computational modeling, and experimental design to address key challenges in plasma physics. By…

PhD student Diogo C went to Huntsville, Alabama, from October 28th to October 30th, 2024 to attent the 1st FTPP Annual International AL Plasma Physics Conference (AIAPC) – AI-Informed Plasma Physics: the Opportunities. He gave a talk containing the recent work preformed by GoLP/IST & UCLA on combining machine learning algorithms and plasma simulators.

Some of our GoLP members went to Atlanta, Georgia USA to attend the 66th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics, held on 7-11 October 2024, and presented a talk about their recent work.
In the first picture: Frederico F, Diogo C, Paulo A, Bernardo B, Thales S, Kevin S and Luis G.
Here, are some pictures from the event:

José M, a master’s student in epp, has been awarded the ‘Talentos Quânticos’ scholarship. This initiative by the Portuguese Quantum Institute is designed to support young researchers in the field of Quantum Science and Technologies, including Quantum Computing, by providing financial assistance for research on a related topic. Congratulations to José!