The electromagnetic instabilities in a plasma driven by an initial anisotropy in the distribution function, commonly known as Weibel instabilities, are believed to play a fundamental role for the generation of magnetic fields nearby remote astrophysical objects. The same processes may develop on enormously different spatial and temporal scales in a laboratory laser-produced plasma, which provides an excellent test bed for the uprising “laboratory astrophysics”. A collaboration between research groups from UK, France and Germany with the contribution of a researcher from INO (A.Macchi) for the theoretical interpretation has provided experimental evidence of a filamentary Weibel instability, whose dynamics has been investigated with the proton probing technique with picosecond resolution. These results, of interest for the understanding of magnetic field generation in astrophysical jets, have been published on Physical Review Letters.

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