This prize is awarded jointly by the EPS Plasma Physics Division and the Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion (PPCF) journal of IOP Publishing to exceptional plasma physicists in the early stages of their careers. The prize is funded by PPCF.

The award is named after Prof. Dr. Sylvie Jacquemot from the Laboratoire pour l’Utilisation des Lasers Intenses (LULI) located at École Polytechnique, France. Her scientific research encompasses plasma physics and related high-energy-density applications, in particular inertial fusion sciences and X-ray laser physics. She chaired the EPS Plasma Physics Division Board from 2012 – 2016. Currently, she is the Coordinator of the Laserlab-Europe Consortium which brings together 35 leading organisations in laser-based inter-disciplinary research from 18 countries.

Background

Eligibility

Eligible nominees for the EPS – PPCF Sylvie Jacquemot Early Career Prize are persons of any nationality, based in any country, who have made a substantial contribution to plasma physics and who, on January 31 in the year of the award, have less than six years of work experience following the award of a doctoral degree or less than ten years of experience in full-time research. These periods of eligibility can be extended to take account of career breaks if documentary evidence for them is provided.

Nominees and nominators do not need to be members of the EPS, and self-nominations will be accepted. However, nominees and nominators cannot be current members of the EPS Plasma Physics Division Board.

Award

In addition to receiving a cash prize and a certificate, the winner will be invited to give a talk on their work at the annual EPS Conference on Plasma Physics. 

Each nomination needs to include:

• Name and contact details of the nominator
• Name and contact details of the nominee  
• Short citation (up to 200 characters) 
• Long citation (up to 2,500 characters) 
• Short biography of the nominee (up to 6,000 characters) 
• Supporting evidence (up to 3,500 characters) including a list of up to 5 publications, talks, and/or patents after obtaining a PhD (or over the six years prior to January 31 in the year of the award if the nominee does not have a PhD).
• Documentary evidence for career breaks if an extension of the eligibility period is requested. An English translation should be attached if the documentation is not in that language.
• Contact details of two referees and their supporting statements (up to 300 words each)

The international physics community has a diverse and global membership, and both nominees and recipients of EPS awards need to reflect that diversity to ensure that all physicists have an opportunity to be recognized for their impact in the field. Nominations of individuals from groups historically underrepresented in physics, including women, LGBT+ scientists, scientists from Black or other minority ethnic backgrounds, scientists who are refugees or have been displaced, disabled scientists, and scientists from institutions with limited resources, are especially encouraged.

Nominees for and holders of EPS awards are expected to meet certain standards of professional conduct and integrity. They have an obligation to avoid fabrication, falsification and plagiarism, and they have an obligation to treat people well. This prohibits abuse of power, requires fair and respectful relationships with colleagues, subordinates, and students, and eschews bias, whether implicit or explicit. Violations of these standards may disqualify people from consideration or cause revocation of awards.     

Nominations for the 2025 award are now open. Please send nominations using this typeform link by Friday the 28th of February 2025.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us by email using the address epsjacquemot@bsc.es.

Previous prize winners

Long citation

Anthony Murphy is a recognised leader in atmospheric-pressure plasma R&D, particularly thermal (arc) plasmas. His work has been highly influential, as demonstrated by his high citation rate (>13,000 in the Web of Science, >19,000 in Google Scholar), the highest of any thermal plasma researcher, present or past. As well as their significant impact on the research community, Dr Murphy’s scientific advances have been instrumental in ensuring the uptake of his R&D by industry. Three examples demonstrate the industrial impact of his work and its relation to his research results:

Development of the Plascon (now Pyroplas^TM) waste-treatment process, used worldwide to destroy ozone-depleting substances, greenhouse gases and toxic liquids. Dr Murphy’s computational model of the Plascon process was the first thermal plasma model to include fluid-dynamic, magnetohydrodynamic and detailed chemical-kinetic phenomena. He applied the model to identify the unwanted recombination reactions that occurred when destroying ozone-depleting substances, which led to the redesign of the process to add steam to the reactants. This modification has been used on all five Plascon plants (in Australia, UK, USA and Mexico) that destroy ozone-depleting substances and trifluoromethane.

Development of the “ArcWeld” welding simulation software package for use in industry. The software has been transferred to General Motors, USA and CRRC (China Rail and Rolling Stock Corporation) for use in the automotive and rail industries. Dr Murphy’s approach is unique in capturing all the important physical processes occurring in the arc plasma, electrode and weld pool in three dimensions. A critical innovation in the model is the inclusion of the influence of metal vapour, which cools the arc because of its strong radiative emission, leading to a ~50% reduction in the depth of the weld. This built on Dr Murphy’s pioneering work on understanding the effect of metal vapour in thermal plasmas. The innovations mean the model can reliably predict weld properties for a wide range of welding parameters with minimal benchmarking.

Calculation of the thermophysical properties of thermal plasmas for industry. Dr Murphy’s thermophysical data have been adopted by over 80 research groups and companies in over 25 countries and are widely used as a benchmark. Moreover, his combined diffusion coefficient method transformed the computational modelling of thermal plasmas in gas mixtures by allowing species (molecules, atoms, ions, electrons) to be grouped into their parent gases, greatly reducing the complexity of the problem. Dr Murphy’s data have been applied by companies such as Siemens, Pfiffner and Sensata Technologies for circuit breaker development, CFX Berlin for use in commercial CFD software, Boeing for modelling the influence of lightning on aircraft, and LS Electric (Korea) for the development of circuit breakers in novel insulating gases to replace SF₆ (a strong greenhouse gas). His data have also been used by collaborators in Asia and Europe for projects funded by companies such as Kobe Steel, Yumex, and Nissan Tanaka Corporation to develop improved arc welding and plasma cutting processes, circuit breakers and arc lamps.

Long citation

Professors Pisin Chen, James Benjamin Rosenzweig and Chandrashekhar Janardan Joshi have explored the interaction of bunched particle beams – extreme forms of non-neutral plasmas – with plasma across wide parameter regimes. In particular, they have invented and pioneered beam-driven plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA). In PWFA, intense 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 in conventional accelerators. Their applications range from compact, intense, relativistic electron beam sources to novel intense photon pulse sources to ultra-relativistic beams for high energy physics research. The concept of PWFA, and its first demonstration, was achieved in the 1980s, explored in the decades since, and today, a vibrant community drives forward their development and exploitation at numerous smaller, medium-sized and large laboratories, including CERN.

Pisin Chen is regarded as the inventor of PWFA, and has contributed numerous seminal theoretical publications on the plasma wakefield accelerator principle, energy transfer and beam loading, and plasma lenses at SLAC 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. Pisin led the E-150 Plasma Lens experiment at SLAC, that successfully demonstrated the plasma lens principle as predicted. He then went on to explore cosmology and gravity, and today, as Director of the Leung Center for Cosmology and Particle Astrophysics and after numerous honours such as the 2018 Blaise Pascal Chair, Ile de France, he works on bringing together plasma wakefield accelerators with black hole physics.

James Benjamin Rosenzweig has experimentally demonstrated PWFA for the first time in the 1980s, and is regarded as 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 with arising linear accelerating and focusing electric field structures. He contributed many theoretical and experimental foundations of the field and e.g. together with Chen and other pioneers, developed plasma lenses. He is a pioneer also in various other high-gradient accelerator technologies and light source development such as free-electron lasers, for which he received the 2007 International FEL prize. Jamie has not only held various fellowships himself, but has influenced the field at UCLA and facilities across the US such as SLAC, but also in Europe, and a remarkable large number of former students are now field leaders themselves.

Chandrashekhar Janardan Joshi has since the early 1980s contributed pioneering works to both, laser-driven plasma interaction as well as particle beam driven plasma wakefield interaction. Likewise at UCLA, he was able to translate many techniques and concepts from LWFA, where the plasma wave is driven by intense laser pulses, to PWFA, and pushed forward a pioneering program of PWFA R&D first with SLAC’s Final Focus Test Beam and then at the FACET facility. This included milestones such as energy doubling of 42 GeV electrons in the blowout regime in a meter-scale plasma, positron-driven PWFA, acceleration of positrons with PWFA, or plasma wigglers. This has set off the modern era of PWFA, which is now more vibrant and successful than ever. Chan has received various honours for his plasma research, such as the 1996 John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research, or the 2006 James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics. Together, Chen, Rosenzweig and Joshi have pioneered and steered the field of particle beam-plasma interaction over many decades.

Long citation

Professors Tünde Fülöp and Per Helander have significantly advanced plasma theory through a number of fundamental contributions. Their research spans many topics including runaway electrons, kinetic instabilities and transport processes in magnetized plasmas. By pinpointing key physical mechanisms, they have catalyzed innovative developments in experimental devices for nuclear fusion applications.

Professor Tünde Fülöp has been a leader in the field of disruptions and relativistic “runaway” electrons associated with these events. She has systematically explored the physics of runaway electrons in tokamaks and beyond, and conducted unprecedented modelling efforts applicable to both existing experiments and future devices. As part of this endeavour, Professor Fülöp has investigated various facets of the problem, including runaway-electron-driven electromagnetic instabilities, the impact of different collision types, radiation reaction effects, and the role of partially ionized impurities on runaway electron dynamics. Additionally, she has evaluated and optimized disruption mitigation strategies involving external magnetic perturbations and massive material injection. Furthermore, Professor Fülöp has played a crucial role in overseeing the development of several open-source, state-of-the-art runaway modelling tools and synthetic diagnostics. These tools have gained widespread use in the scientific community, reflecting her commitment to advancing collective knowledge in the field.

Professor Per Helander has obtained seminal results in the theory of stellarator plasmas by systematically exploring the question of how the properties of magnetically confined plasmas depend on the geometry of the magnetic field. In most such plasmas, turbulent transport caused by micro-instabilities arising from plasma density and temperature gradients poses a significant challenge. Professor Helander foresaw a crucial development, the absence of the most important density-gradient-driven instability in certain types of magnetic fields. This prediction is believed to underpin the remarkable record plasma performance achieved in the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator. In addressing long-standing concerns about neoclassical impurity accumulation in stellarators, professor Helander demonstrated a possible route to avoiding it in collisionality regimes relevant to reactors. Furthermore, he identified important differences between stellarators and tokamaks concerning plasma rotation. On large scales, it is relatively slow in stellarators and governed by neoclassical processes even in the presence of turbulent transport, and on small scales zonal flows behave differently. These and other revelations have shaped the general understanding of stellarator plasmas and the burgeoning field of stellarator optimization.