As it happened in previous years IT was once again very well represented in the “XII Congresso do Comité Português da URSI”, held last December 14 at the Fundação Portuguesa das Comunicações, in Lisbon, with two of its students winning the first and second places of the Best Student Paper Award.

With the aim of encouraging young authors, since 2011 ANACOM has sponsored the Best Student Paper Award, in the amount of 500€, to be awarded to the best article submitted by a student, who is the first author of the article to be presented in the annual Congresso do Comité Português da URSI.

Solange Silva, a PhD student from Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia of the University of Coimbra, was awarded the first place, which amounts to 500€, for her work “Trapping Light in Open Nanocavities with Spatial Dispersion”. In her work, developed at IT in Coimbra under the coordination of Tiago Morgado and Mário Silveirinha, Solange Silva demonstrated that spatial dispersion effects open novel possibilities for inducing embedded eigenstates in plasmonic nanostructures, which can have applications in optical memories and others. Unlike the local meta-atom configurations, the nonlocal particle is capable of sustaining multifrequency embedded eigenstates for the same geometry.

The second place went to Filipa Fernandes for the work “Simulation of MIMO Channel for 5G in Millimeter Waves”. The MsC student from Instituto Superior Técnico has developed her work at IT in Lisbon under the coordination of António Rodrigues and Maria Paula Queluz. Filipa Fernandes developed a MIMO channel simulator for millimeter-waves, which, contrary to the existing ones, considers the antennas' real-life conditions and detailed test conditions, which allows to evaluate different types of antennas for mm-wave in terms of implementation on mobile phones


Photo: Solange Silva with the Vice-President of ANACOM, João Coelho