EuPRAXIA Virtual Seminar Series – Register now!

Our brand-new EuPRAXIA Virtual Seminar Series will kick off on Friday 9th May at 11:00 BST. The seminar will be given by Jorge Vieira of Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST) who will present ‘Achieving superradiant plasma accelerator-based light sources with collective effects’.

Seminars in this series will cover some of EuPRAXIA’s core themes, giving an insight into cutting-edge research in these areas. At the end of the talk, there will be a Q&A session with the speaker.

Jorge Vieira

About the talk

Coherent light sources, such as free electron lasers, provide bright beams for biology, chemistry, physics, and advanced technological applications. As their brightness increases, these sources are also becoming progressively larger, with the longest being several km long (e.g. LCLS). Plasma accelerators are much more compact and can play a key role in bringing these sources to smaller laboratories. Reaching this goal requires orders of magnitude increase in the brightness delivered by plasma accelerator-based light sources. A radical enhancement of beam brightness in plasma accelerator light sources depends directly on the onset of temporal coherence and superradiance.

Here, we investigate a new radiation emission mechanism that may bring temporal coherence and superradiance to plasma accelerator-based light sources [1]. The concept makes use of the radiation produced by an ensemble of light-emitting particles exhibiting collective, matter-wave effects. Such collective motions, which can be as simple as a plasma wave, are pervasive in plasma physics and, notably, in plasma-based accelerators. We find that the trajectory of the centroid of such collective perturbation (which we denote as a quasi-particle) determines key radiation aspects, such as temporal coherence, just as if it were a single particle undergoing a similar trajectory.

We apply this concept to obtain superradiant emission using relativistic electron bunches, and in plasma accelerator-based light sources, to generate broadband and narrow bandwidth superradiant and temporally coherent radiation in the XUV/soft-xray region. We use theory and particle-in-cell simulations complemented by the Radiation Diagnostic for Osiris (RaDiO) [2], and discuss a recent experimental verification [3].

[1] B. Malaca et al, Nature Photonics 18, pages 39–45 (2024)

[2] M. Pardal et al, Comp. Phys. Communs. 285, 108634 (2023)

[3] S. Fu et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 045001 (2025).

About the speaker

Jorge Vieira is a computational and theoretical plasma physicist and an associate professor at Instituto Superior Técnico. He has specialised in laser-matter and beam-matter interactions at ultra-high intensities, combined with high performance computing as a tool to explore new, more compact plasma-based accelerators and light sources. In addition to his mentoring and supervision activities, he lectures on plasma physics, computational physics, and electromagnetism. He is also involved in several pan-european plasma-accelerator related projects such as EuPRAXIA, the advanced wakefield acceleration experiment (AWAKE) at CERN, and served as a member of the European expert panel for plasma-based accelerators for the 2020 update of the European strategy for particle physics.

How to attend

Participation is free, but you need to register to attend this and other webinars in the series. For more information and how to register please follow this link. Once registered, you will receive the Zoom connection details on the morning of the online seminar.

The seminar details

Speaker: Jorge Vieira

Seminar Title: “Achieving superradiant plasma accelerator-based light sources with collective effects”

Date/time: Friday 9th May at 11:00 BST