This is the home page of the Plasma Physics Division of the European Physical Society.
News
Call for nominations
- 2024 EPS Plasma Physics Division Alfvén Prize: deadline Monday, November 6th 2023 (23:59 CET) – more information here
- 2024 EPS Plasma Physics Division PhD Research Awards: deadline Tuesday, November 28th 2023 (23:59 CET) – more information here
- 2024 EPS Plasma Physics Division Innovation Award: deadline Thursday, February 15th 2023 (23:59 CET) – more information here
- 2024 Landau-Spitzer Prize: deadline 1st April 2024 – more information here
50th EPS DPP Plasma Physics conference
The 50th EPS DPP Plasma Physics conference will be held from July 8th to July 12th 2024 in Salamanca, Spain.
49th EPS DPP Plasma Physics conference
The 49th EPS DPP Plasma Physics conference was held from July 3rd to July 7th 2023 at the Bordeaux Congress Center (Bordeaux, France) with, among other very facinating talks, the lectures given by the 2023 Hannes Alfvén and Innovation prize recipients (see prize announcements below).
More information on the conference website.
It was be also the opportunity to encourage the youngest researchers and highlight their ongoing studies through two sets of awards.
The 2023 PPCF / EPS / IUPAP Student Poster Prizes were granted to:
- Sophie Gorno (EPFL, Switzerland) for her poster “Experiments and modelling to characterize the effect of connection length on power exhaust in TCV”,
special mentions to Paul Heinrich (IPP-Garching, Germany) for “Analysis of shattered pellet injection in ASDEX Upgrade”, Lina Velarde (University of Seville, Spain) for “Effect of Edge Localized Modes and magnetic perturbations on fast ion confinement in MAST-U”; Paul Mulholland (TU Eindhoven, The Netherlands) for “Enhanced transport at high plasma beta due to subthreshold kinetic ballooning modes in Wendelstein 7-X geometry” and Alessandro Balestri (EPFL, Switzerland) for “Role of aspect ration in confinement enhancement in negative triangularity plasmas” - Radka Štefaníková (HZDR Dresden, Germany) for her poster “Spatially resolved X-ray emission lines as a signature of electron dynamics in short-pulse solid-density laser-plasma interaction”,
- Michael Nastac (Oxford University, UK) for his poster “Irreversible stochastic heating via phase-space entropy cascade in nearly collisionless plasma turbulence”,
- Swarnima Singh (Institute for Plasma Research, India) for her poster “Experimental observation of a triple point for a complex (dusty) plasma”.
For the 2023 Kyushu University Itoh project Prize, three highly recommended presentations were awarded, since they were too competitive to select a winner. The three selected presentations were:
- Mario Raeth for “Excitation of high frequency waves in 6D kinetic Vlasov ITG simulation”,
- Jean Cazobonne for “Experimental and numerical evidence of electron turbulent transport enhancement by electron-cyclotron waves in tokamaks”,
- Oliver Panico for “Transport and zonal flows dynamics in flux-driven interchange and drift waves turbulence”.
2023 EPS-PPD PhD Innovation Prize
The 2023 Innovation Prize of the EPS Plasma Division is awarded to Prof. Dr. Annemie Bogaerts (head of the PLASMANT research group, University of Antwerp, Belgium) and Dr. Georgi Trenchev (CTO of the climate tech start-up D-CRBN, Belgium) for their efforts that bring plasma-based CO2 conversion from the lab to industry.
2023 EPS-PPD PhD Research Awards
The 2023 PhD Research Awards of the EPS Plasma Division are awarded to:
- Dr Luis Gil (Instituto Superior Tecnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal) for his thesis on “Stationary ELM-free H-mode in ASDEX Upgrade”,
- Dr Maurizio Giacomin (Swiss Plasma Center, EPLF, Lausanne, Switzerland) for his thesis on “Turbulent transport regimes in the tokamak boundary”,
- Dr Livio Verra (Technical University Munich, Germany) for his thesis on “Electron Bunch Seeding of the Self-Modulation Instability in Plasma”, and
- Dr David Hosking (University of Oxford, UK) for his thesis on “The decay of MHD turbulence and the primordial origin of magnetic fields in cosmic voids”.
2023 EPS Hannes Alfvén Prize
The 2023 EPS Hannes Alfvén Prize is jointly awarded to professors Pisin Chen (National Taiwan University), James Benjamin Rosenzweig (University of California, Los Angeles) and Chandrashekhar Janardan Joshi (University of California, Los Angeles) for proposing, demonstrating, and conducting impressive ground-breaking experiments on plasma wakefield accelerators driven by particle beams. The three winners have contributed to different, complementary aspects of the field: they have developed the theoretical concepts, conducted the pioneering demonstration experiments, and guided the applications of this acceleration technique.
Professors Pisin Chen, James Benjamin Rosenzweig and Chandrashekhar Janardan Joshi have invented and pioneered beam-driven plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA). In PWFA, intense charged particle beams (electrons, positrons, or protons) excite strong plasma wave oscillations, which can provide focusing and accelerating electric fields three to four orders of magnitude larger than those in conventional accelerators. PWFA was conceived and first demonstrated in the 1980s. It has been explored in the decades since, and today a vibrant community drives forward their development and exploitation at numerous small, medium-sized, and large laboratories, including CERN. The applications range from compact, intense, relativistic electron beam sources to novel intense photon pulse sources to ultra-relativistic beams for high energy physics research.
Prof. Pisin Chen is regarded as the inventor of PWFA and played a key role in the theoretical development of the plasma wakefield accelerator principle, energy transfer and beam loading, and plasma lenses at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the 1980s. The extreme gradients and energy gains obtainable from PWFA was a pathbreaking innovation at the energy frontier, and the extreme focusing with plasma lenses was a pathbreaking innovation at the luminosity frontier. He led an experiment at SLAC that successfully demonstrated the plasma lens principle as predicted.
Prof. James Benjamin Rosenzweig experimentally demonstrated PWFA for the first time in the 1980s and is regarded as the father of the non-linear “blowout” interaction regime, where the beam driver is so intense that it expels all plasma electrons and forms a spherical blowout leading to the formation of linear accelerating and focusing electric field structures. He contributed to many theoretical and experimental foundations of the field and, together with Chen and other pioneers, developed plasma lenses.
Prof. Chandrashekhar Janardan Joshi has since the early 1980s made pioneering contributions to the investigation of both laser-driven plasma interactions and particle beam-driven plasma wakefield interactions. He was able to translate many techniques and concepts from LWFA (laser wakefield acceleration), where the plasma wave is driven by intense laser pulses, to PWFA. He pushed forward a pioneering program of PWFA R&D, which included milestones such as energy doubling of 42 GeV electrons in the blowout regime in a metre-scale plasma, positron-driven PWFA, acceleration of positrons with PWFA, and plasma wigglers. This has led to the modern era of PWFA, which is now more vibrant and successful than ever.
The 2022 Lev D. Landau and Lyman Spitzer Jr. Award for Outstanding Contributions to Plasma Physics, jointly sponsored by the Plasma Physics Divisions of the American Physical Society and the European Physical Society, is going to:
– Christopher Chen (Queen Mary University London, UK),
– Gregory Howes (University of Iowa, USA), and
– Kristopher Klein (University of Arizona, USA)
for “the theoretical development of the field-particle correlation technique and its application to spacecraft measurements directly showing that electron Landau damping plays a role in the dissipation of space plasma turbulence.”
The 2022 Selection Committee was composed of William Heidbrink (Chair), Vladimir Tikhonchuk (Vice Chair), Andrea Ciardi, Tammy Ma, Kristel Cromb and Troy Carter.
More information on the recipients on the APS website.
More information on the prize here.
On 1st July 2022, Richard Dendy stepped down as Chair of the EPS Plasma Physics Division at the closing session of the 48th Annual European Conference on Plasma Physics, after leading the division for exactly six years. His successor as Chair is Kristel Crombé, who has been Hon. Sec. of the EPS-PPD Board since 2016.
The EPS condemns the continuing attacks by the Russian Federation against Ukraine.
Read the statement.
BP&IF conference announcements here
Implementation guidance on the Plan S principles released on November 27, 2018.
More information on the cOAlition S webpage.
Mentoring scheme for Women in Physics: for more information, click here.
Objectives of the Plasma Physics Division
- to unite European scientists interested in the physics of fully and partially ionized gases
- to promote research and teaching in plasma physics and its applications, to facilitate research collaboration and to represent European physicists outside Europe
- to coordinate activities with the other physical societies, such as the American Physical Society and the Physical Society of Japan
- to collaborate on the Editorial Board of Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion.
The Plasma Physics Division is responsible for the annual EPS Conference on Plasma Physics and for granting several Awards.
Useful links