The Institute of Physics (IOP) recently held its annual Plasma Physics conference, involving a number of academics from Imperial’s Plasma group.

The 47th IOP Plasma Physics conference was held virtually in April 2021, and in addition to covering the many varied aspects of plasma physics, also celebrated the centenary of the IOP.

Members of Imperial’s Plasma Physics group took part, both as organisers and participants, and some won prizes – many congratulations!

The Malcolm Haines Prize for an early career physicist in plasma physics

Dr Rob Shalloo, former research associate in the Plasma Physics Group, has been awarded the Malcom Haines Prize for an early career physicist. This award is presented by the IOP Plasma Physics Group every two years to an early career researcher based in the UK or Ireland working in the field of Plasma Physics. It is named in honour of the late Malcolm Haines, an outstanding plasma physicist and former head of the Plasma Physics Group at Imperial.

The award cites recent work undertaken on the use of Machine Learning with Plasma Accelerators; a collaboration between the JAI here at Imperial together with colleagues from the UK, the US and Germany led by Dr Matthew Streeter. The cited paper can be found here:

R. J. Shalloo et al., "Automation and control of laser wakefield accelerators using Bayesian Optimisation”, Nature Communications, 11, 6355 (2020).

Dr Shalloo also presented a talk at this year’s event: Automation and control of laser wakefield accelerators using Bayesian optimization.

The Culham Thesis Prize

The Culham Thesis Prize recognises the best PhD thesis in UK plasma Physics, and this year was awarded to Stefan Mijin.

Stefan presented a talk at this year’s event: Modelling of Kinetic Effects in Parallel Transport in the Tokamak Scrape-Off Layer.

Poster prize

Research postgraduate, Wei Wu, won best poster presented by a student at the conference for her poster: Pair Production Rate in a Thermal Bath by Thermal Quantum Field Theory.

Invited talk

Head of Imperial’s Plasma Physics group, Professor Sergey Lebedev, was also invited to present a talk at this year’s event: Pulsed power-driven magnetic reconnection experiments.