During the Advanced Accelerators Concepts Workshop 2024 our PhD student Carolina Amoedo won the Best Student Poster Award. She received this award by presenting the work “Demonstration of proton bunch self-modulation in a discharge plasma source”. Many congratulations to Carolina!

On Monday, 27th of November at 2:00 pm, there will be a GoLP VIP Seminar by Hamed Merdji (Laboratoire d’Optique Appliquée Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France). The event will take place at Anfiteatro Abreu Faro – Complexo I at IST.
Title: From classical to the quantum nature of high harmonic generation
 

Part 1 – Classical HHG : I will first present classical high-harmonic generation in semiconductor as a light up-conversion process occurring in a strong laser field, leading to coherent attosecond bursts of extreme broadband radiation. I will show how a strong laser polarization dependence that can be used to gate isolated attosecond pulses. I will show how nano-structuration of semiconductors can be used to generate structured light such as beam carrying orbital angular momentum or to produce a dramatic enhancement of the HHG emission. Our all semiconductor HHG nano-emitters can work sustainability over days and can be used as ultrafast petahertz optoelectronic devices.
Part 2 – Quantum HHG : We propose…

APPLAuSE student Joana Alves successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled “Ultrafast mid-infrared unable sources” on September 19, 2023. Her work was supervised by Gonçalo Figueira, Hugo Pires (both at IPFN/IST) and Jens Biegert (ICFO, Spain).
During her PhD, Joana specialised in the study of ultrafast mid-infrared (wavelengths from 3-8 µm) laser technology, in particular nonlinear amplification of ultrashort pulses and their compression.
She evaluated strategies for achieving few-cycle, millijoule-level pulses in this wavelength region, working with three different laser systems, at the Laboratory for Intense Lasers, IST and at the Attosecond and Ultrafast Optics group at ICFO. One of the main results is the implementation study of a new ultrafast (5-optical-cycles), high energy (5 mJ), 3 μm laser system and an analysis of the main challenges for compressing pulses at this wavelength range.
The PhD jury, consisting of Greg Greetham (STFC, UK), Olivier Chalus (Thales, France), Ana G. Silva (FCT-UNL, Portugal), Gareth…

Victor Hariton successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Nonlinear spectral broadening and pulse compression in multipass cells” on April 27, 2023, being awarded the top final grade of Approved with Distinction Cum Laude.
During his PhD, Victor specialised in solid-state laser science and technology and nonlinear optics, investigating topics ranging from high repetition rate diode-pumped amplifiers to nonlinear pulse compression mechanisms. He performed research at the Laboratory for Intense Lasers, IST, and at the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg, Germany, with Oleg Pronin’s team. He integrated the APPLAuSE 2017 class and joined GoLP for his thesis, under the supervision of Gonçalo Figueira and Celso P. João.
In particular, Victor worked on the design and experimental development of a novel concave-convex setup for pulse compression in multipass cells, as well as the application of Heriott cells for compression in the green spectral region. He had a key role in the development of…

On Friday, 14th of October at 11:00 am, we had our October GoLP VIP Seminar, by Fernando Haas (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul). The event took place at Anfiteatro Abreu Faro – Complexo I at IST.
Title: Foundations of Quantum Magnetohydrodynamics
Abstract: The suitable density and temperature ranges where quantum effects are relevant for plasmas are reviewed. Typically such quantum plasmas are characterized by large densities and low temperatures, with a significant overlap of the wave packets of the charge carriers. In this case, the wave nature of electrons, which generally have a much smaller mass than ions, becomes unavoidable deserving a quantum description. Examples arise in compact stars such as white dwarfs and neutron stars, in ultra-small electronic devices and in intense laser-solid density plasma interaction experiments. strong from quantum kinetic theory, we discuss the foundations and the need for quantum hydrodynamic models for the nonlinear treatment of quantum plasmas. In this context, the…

Considering the year of the Portugal-France Season 2022 and with the support of the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, the French Ministry of Culture, the Camões Institute – Institute of Cooperation and Language and the Office of Cultural Strategy, Planning and Evaluation (GEPAC), the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation of France (MESRI) and the French Academy of Sciences awarded four Prix Tremplin Mariano Gago awards. Four scientific pairs were awarder with 84.000 euro. In particular, Professor Marta Fajardo, professor of the Department of Physics (DF) and researcher of the Institute of Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion (IPFN), and Professor Hamed Merdji, with the NanoXIMAGES project. The project proposed has practical application in the aria of nanotechnologies, aiming to prove that it is possible to reconstruct an X-ray image of an object through a process with incoherent light. This technique has a strong applicability for the area of medicine and…

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).
 

The Spanish Center for Pulsed Lasers (CLPU) and the Instituto Técnico de Lisboa in collaboration with the European infrastructure ELI-ERIC, through the Impulse Project, will celebrate on 12th of November a joint event to look for synergies among the two laser infrastructures and the European consortium in order to improve high-intensity lasers science to a future for development, innovation and education in this field.
The event will be online from 9 am to 1 pm (Lisbon time) and it will start with an introduction to the laser technologies and applications in ELI, followed by two sessions on innovation and education opportunities for Portugal and Spain.
We will post soon the final program with the confirmed speakers, so stay tuned!
We cordially invite you to participate in this First Introductory ELI ERIC Iberian Information Day, so please make your registration here.

Mukhtar Hussain defended successfully his PhD thesis on October 20, 2021 and passed with Distinction. He was awarded a fellowship in the APPLAuSE doctoral program on Plasma Science and Engineering in 2016 and joined GoLP for his thesis under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Marta Fajardo, and co-supervised by Dr. Gareth Williams (also IST) and Dr. Hamed Merdji (LIDYL, CEA-Saclay).During his PhD, Mukhtar used ultrashort laser pulses to investigate harmonic generation in solids. He studied the interplay between perturbative and non-perturbative effects in 2nd and 3rd harmonic generation in MgO and chromium-doped MgO, also showing that by introducing dopants into simple crystals  the electronic structure can be shaped to tailor the non-linear optical response. He also investigated the nonlinear propagation effects of the ultrafast intense near-infrared pulses in a range of wide bandgap dielectrics, mapping the crystal response by measuring the polarization and ellipticity response of the harmonics.
During his secondment at the Laboratoire d’Optique Apliquée, France, he…

X-GoLP member João MD participated in a fact checking TV show last week to explain instant ice formation, a popular phenomenon in recent social media videos. In this news clip (in Portuguese), recorded in the laboratory of experimental physics at Técnico, João MD shows that this is a common and well understood phenomenon.