Firefighters operate in adverse and hazardous conditions, facing smoke, toxic gases and high temperatures, and risking physical exhaustion and emotional stress. Additionally, connectivity issues often hinder timely risk and health assessments, as well as the management of teams and resources, compromising the efficiency and effectiveness of firefighting strategies.
This project focuses on...
The last decades saw substantial progress in understanding the equilibrium phases and phase transitions of low-temperature quantum matter. These so-called quantum phase transitions host genuine quantum coherent phenomena that may display exotic properties and phase transitions whose universality classes differ from those of classical systems. However, certain systems — namely electronic...
The design and modeling of a plasma reactor for the conversion of CO₂ into O₂ offers a novel and sustainable approach to addressing the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere. By utilizing plasma-assisted processes and oxygen-conducting membranes, the project investigates the potential to split CO₂ into its base components, enabling the production of a continuous oxygen...
The world is facing an urgent challenge: the need for sustainable and clean energy solutions. Highways, with their vast and underutilised infrastructure, present an innovative opportunity through the integration of photovoltaic panels.
In this work, I employed YOLO, a state-of-the-art computer vision algorithm, to automatically detect and identify highway structures and evaluate their...
Astrophysical collisionless shocks are ubiquitous in the Universe and are observed to amplify magnetic fields and accelerate electrons and protons to highly relativistic speeds in a variety of places, from supernova remnants to active galactic nuclei. In the well-established model of diffusive shock acceleration, electrons are accelerated by multiple shock front crossings; however, this...
The ability to efficiently model highly magnetized plasmas is critical for the study of both astrophysical processes and magnetic fusion devices. However, resolving the high gyrofrequencies associated with these plasmas from first-principles is computationally demanding. In this work, we explore the use of a guiding center approximation (GCA) to relax the demanding resolutions required,...
Tokamak research has long used the H-mode to attempt to achieve the conditions necessary for fusion energy, but it is plagued by Edge Localized modes (ELMs) which disrupt confinement and represent a hazard to plasma facing components. The EDA H-mode is a promising regime which lacks these ELMs, and thus warrants research in its viability of use for large scale machines like ITER and DEMO. The...
The search for ultra-high-energy (UHE) neutrinos has garnered significant attention. These neutrinos are not only expected if the composition of UHE cosmic rays includes protons at the highest energies, but they are also anticipated if hadronic processes occur during the acceleration of these particles. UHE neutrinos are expected to be produced, escape from their astrophysical accelerators...
In 2021, cancer was the second leading cause of death in the European Union, representing more than 20% of the total number of fatalities, according to Eurostat. Even though there are several treatment options, such as chemotherapy, surgery, and radiotherapy, there is no single, fully effective treatment.
Radiotherapy (RT) is one of the most used therapies worldwide, accounting for more than...
Laser-Induced Breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is a powerful analytical technique used to determine the chemical composition of a sample, by examining the light emitted from a plasma produced on its surface using an intense and short laser pulse.
LIBS offers several advantages over other analytical techniques, making it a valuable tool in a wide range of applications. LIBS requires minimal to...
FISSIONIST is a low-power nuclear reactor simulator designed to replicate the operational conditions of the Reactor Português de Investigação (RPI). It will be used for the training of nuclear engineering students by providing a safe and realistic simulation of reactor dynamics.
In this project, the new cooling circuits module will be developed, incorporating the reading of control...
Vision is the sense humans rely the most on in daily activities. It is allowed by the presence of natural photoreceptors in the eye that absorb the incident light and transmit the visual inputs to the brain.
The degeneration of natural photoreceptors in the eye leads to debilitating visual impairments, such as Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) which is one of the leading causes of legal...
Light possesses spatiotemporal characteristics, including amplitude, phase, polarization, and frequency, making it a complete energy and information carrier. As such, we must understand how and to what extent we can manipulate light so that we can use it for applications like optical microscopy, laser-induced nuclear fusion, and material processing. Optical metasurfaces are incredibly useful...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized many areas of information technology, such as data analysis, automation, predictive modeling, and decision-making processes. However, as we continue to generate and process an ever-growing tsunami of data, the global electricity consumption associated with these operations is becoming a significant concern. Photonics, the science of light...
Conventional computer hardware suffers from the “memory wall” or von Neumann bottleneck, where data transfer between memory arrays and processors leads to significant latency and energy inefficiencies. A promising solution to this issue is in-memory computing hardware, which integrates memory and computation in the same unit. Neuromorphic computing is one such architecture, designed to emulate...
Fingerprints are one of the best ways to identify people, they have been used to solve crimes and link suspects to the crime scene for over 100 years, they are one of the most important tools in criminal investigation. Currently fingerprint imaging is done using optical devices, by using magnetic imaging methods instead additional data can be encoded into the fingerprint and used, for example,...
In real materials, disorder can induce (Anderson) insulating phases. Interestingly, incommensurate or quasiperiodic modulations in crystals can also profoundly affect the localization properties of the electronic wavefunction. As the quasiperiodic perturbation strength increases, single-particle states can transition from delocalized (plane-wave-like), to critical (fractal-like) and finally to...
Magnetoresistive (MR) sensors measure magnetic field intensities with high precision by leveraging resistance changes. Tunneling Magnetoresistance (TMR) sensors, like other MR sensors, rely on the angular difference between the magnetic moments of the Free Layer (FL) and the Reference Layer (RL) to determine resistance. While TMR sensors excel in sensitivity and performance, a key challenge is...
Any theoretical method for the description of nuclear reactions cannot fully describe the nuclear effects inside the nucleus because of the complexity of the nucleus and nuclear forces acting within the nucleus. R-matrix theory does not attempt to describe these forces inside nuclei, but rather uses quantities of internal properties of nuclei as parameters that can be determined from...
The main objective of the project is the study of electromagnetic instabilities in plasmas in the ultra-relativistic regime, focusing on the interaction of electron/positron beams with electron and ion plasmas. This study will be conducted using particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations with the OSIRIS numerical code.
The aim is to reproduce, ab initio, the experimental conditions of the program...
In this work, we pursue the numerical solution of the Einstein equations to study the behavior of gravitational waves at future null infinity. In this pursuit, we study the hyperboloidal coordinate system and its properties and develop a numerical framework capable of handling some variations of the wave equation in this coordinate system, obtaining promising results.
There is a necessity for efficient and accurate algorithms to simulate events that are expected to appear in LISA’s frequency range in the next few decades. With this work, we are exploring an implicit and time-symmetric integrator in the context of the Teukolsky equation. In theory, this time-domain solver shows some advantages to ordinary integrators such as Runge-Kutta 4 for long-time...
In this project, our first goal is to study the different possibilities for the behaviour of a FLRW universe, focusing on the recollapse solution, born from a White Hole in a Big Bang type of singularity. We start by briefly revising the maximal analytical extension of the white hole, followed by a deep study of the FLRW metric and universe. It was possible to obtain the Friedman equation,...
In this work, we studied the Schwarzschild solution to the Einstein equations and replicated previously obtained results in order to create a baseline to use on the study of the q-metric. In the q-metric, the curvature Kretschmann scalar and the radial null geodesics on the equatorial plane were studied in order to reach the tortoise coordinate and null coordinate transformations.
The fast-fashion industry’s environmental impact necessitates innovative solutions to improve sustainability and transparency in textile production. This project focuses on developing advanced digital encoders for next-generation smart RFID tags to facilitate the integration of Digital Product Passports (DPPs) in the textile industry. DPPs provide detailed product lifecycle data, enabling...
Ultracold atom clouds have garnered significant attention for their intricate dynamics, which may exhibit chaotic behavior and remain without a comprehensive explanatory framework. This work explores these dynamics in a $^{85}$Rb cold atom cloud through the integration of explainable deep learning techniques, given the recent meteoric rise of artificial intelligence (AI). This is employed...
