Thanks to funding received under Project 5-100, a Lobachevsky University research team carries out fundamental research with important applications in nonlinear optics, plasma physics and astrophysics.

The project focuses on modelling of quantum processes in intense electromagnetic fields. Large variety of these processes reflect a wide range of phenomena, such as changing spectra of electromagnetic radiation when an intense laser pulse comes into contact with matter; generation of quantum-electrodynamic cascades near the surface of neutron stars and electromagnetic showers in planetary atmospheres and magnetospheres; etc.

Quantum processes in intense electromagnetic fields have attracted much attention due to their connections with areas related to the development of new schemes for high energy particle accelerators, the creation of sources of electromagnetic radiation across a difficultly accessible spectral range and inertial confinement fusion research.

The research team includes: Nikolay Vvedenskii, Head of the Laboratory of Computational Nonlinear Optics, Plasma Physics and Astrophysics at Lobachevsky University, researchers from the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Dr Igor Kostyukov, Alexandr Silaev, Evgeny Nerush and Vladimir Bashmakov) and young researchers from the Advanced School of General and Applied Physics of Lobachevsky University (Anton Golovanov and Dmitry Serebriakov).

In the picture above you can see electromagnetic showers near the surface of the Earth (the picture is from http://ppc.inr.ac.ru/direction_astro.php)