Alfvén Prize

Citation
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. 

Achievements
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. 
 

Innovation Award

Prof. Dr. Annemie Bogaerts , professor at University of Antwerp, leader of PLASMANT research group, and Dr. Georgi Trenchev CTO of D-CRBN (spinoff of University of Antwerp, PLASMANT) for their efforts which clearly bring plasma-based CO2 conversion from the lab to industry.

PhD Research Awards

The EPS Plasma Physics Division Board grants annually up to four prizes to young scientists from the 38 European countries associated with the EPS in recognition of truly outstanding research achievements associated with their PhD study in the broad field of plasma physics.
The EPS Plasma Physics Division Board has the pleasure in announcing the winners of its 2023 PhD Research Award.

The winners of the 2023 edition http://plasma.ciemat.es/eps/awards/phd-research-award/ are:
- Dr. Luis Gil (Instituto Superior Tecnico, Universidade de Lisboa) 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) for his Thesis on "Electron Bunch Seeding of the Self-Modulation Instability in Plasma"
- Dr David Hosking (University of Oxford) for his Thesis on "The decay of MHD turbulence and the primordial origin of magnetic fields in cosmic voids"

PPCF/EPS PhD Poster Prizes

The international journal Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion (PPCF), and the European Physical Society (EPS) are proud to jointly sponsor the PPCF/EPS Student Poster Prizes at the 48th EPS Plasma Physics conference. The competition is judged by members of the Conference Programme Committee. PhD students that wish their poster to be considered for the prize should make sure that they have uploaded their (draft) poster to the online conference platform by Monday June 19.
This years prizes have been awarded to: To be announced

Itoh Project Prize 2023

The Kyushu University Itoh project prize is awarded each year in association with the EPS Conference on Plasma Physics. The prize aims to recognize doctoral students who have performed excellent research on plasma turbulence, transport, confinement, or any related topic. The winner is offered the opportunity to visit Kyushu University, Japan, for one week, including paid flights and living expenses, although the situation may change depending on COVID-19. The competition is judged by a panel of experts chaired by Professor Akihide Fujisawa of Kyushu University. To be announced