Plasma Physics Group

Latest news: Alessandro Biancalani won the PPCF poster prize in the Magnetic Confinement Fusion section at the 35th EPS Conference on Plasma Physics. The award winning poster can be found here.

Welcome to the homepage of the Plasma Physics Group at the Department of Physics, University of Pisa, Italy.

The research interests of the group include the theory and numerical simulation of plasmas, with main focus on collisionless, classical plasmas, and particularly on relativistic plasmas. Theoretical issues include fundamental processes in plasmas as macroscopical, many-body systems far from equilibrium: instabilities, generation of coherent structures such as vortices and solitons, kinetic effects and particle acceleration. In addition, plasmas are also investigated with regard to the modeling and development of applications (controlled nuclear fusion, particle sources, plasma technology).

The activity of the group proceeds along two main lines, namely magnetized plasmas and laser-plasma interactions, but emphasizing common problems and general issues across the two fields.

The plasma simulation activity includes the development of numerical models and codes of different type (fluid, Vlasov, particle-in-cell, hybrid) and their use on supercomputers.

A large part of the group's activity is performed in close collaboration with experimental partners, providing theoretical and numerical support to the modeling of experiments and the interpretation of data.

The group includes faculty members, fellows and students from the University of Pisa and affiliates to the CNISM consortium as well as researchers from CNR-INFM.