The APPLAuSE student Mario Galletti has received the award for the Best PhD Thesis in Optics and Photonics in Portugal, 2020, sponsored by the Portuguese Society for Optics and Photonics – SPOF.

The thesis, with the title of “High contrast front-end for a petawatt laser system designed for electron acceleration & High-intensity laser-matter applications towards advanced compact particle accelerators” was supervised by Prof. Gonçalo Figueira (Instituto Superior Tecnico, Universidade de Lisboa) and Dr. Marco Galimberti (Central Laser Facility, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxford).