The European Physical Society has awarded the Aflvén Prize to Michel Koenig, CNRS Research Director at the Intense Laser Laboratory (LULI*), for his contributions to plasma physics.
Created in January 2025 by Thales, world leader in high-power lasers, GenF aims to develop and industrialize a process for creating a new, safe, abundant, inexpensive and non-polluting form of energy using the inertial confinement nuclear fusion process. The inauguration of its premises in Le Barp, south of Bordeaux, was attended by representatives of the various stakeholders involved.
Operated by École polytechnique and CNRS, Apollon is one of the few facilities in the world with multiple laser beams whose power exceeds one petawatt (one million billion watts). Take a behind-the-scenes look at this infrastructure and the fundamental research being carried out there.
Every year, the CNRS medals are awarded to researchers and staff who have made an outstanding contribution to the institution's dynamism and reputation.
The École Polytechnique and the Military Applications Division of CEA are launching the "Physics of High Energy Densities and Inertial Fusion" Chair to help train students in the physics of high energy densities, and to facilitate the emergence of research collaborations on topics such as fusion for energy by inertial confinement or the physics of magnetised plasmas.
Created by three alumni of École Polytechnique, the event dedicated to space and its exploration takes place from November 17th to 19th on the School’s campus. Hosting SpaceCon 2023 illustrates École Polytechnique's strong commitment to its research, training and innovation missions, and to meeting the most ambitious challenges in space research and exploration.
In many astrophysical processes such as solar flares, particle acceleration is likely to result from the reconnection of different magnetic field lines. In a paper published in Nature Communications, a team including researchers from the Intense Laser Laboratory and the Plasma Physics Laboratory shows that the geometry of these field lines plays a crucial role.
The French Academy of Sciences awarded the Mariano Gago International Prize to Hamed Merdji, research director at Ecole Polytechnique, and Marta Fajardo, professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico de Lisboa, in recognition of their scientific collaboration between France and Portugal.
Today, the Drahi-X-Novation Center offers you an interview with Feng YANG, co-founder and CEO of Invisensing.io, a start-up following our X-TECH program that is working on long-distance sensing based on optical fibers, to collect useful information and integrate it into control and preventive maintenance systems.
Smilei is an open-source code for plasma simulation, the result of a collaboration between physicists and high-performance computing experts. It can simulate relativistic interactions between lasers and plasma or astrophysical phenomena. The workshop from 9 to 11 March explored this vast field of applications.
At LULI, laser beams are amplified and used for nuclear fusion experiments, among other studies. On 18 August, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at...