An
instrument to be jointly designed and built at the University of Colorado
Boulder (CU Boulder) and the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) has been
selected to fly on NASA’s next mission to study Earth’s upper atmosphere.
The Integration Bee is an annual competition open to all WVU and local high school students, consisting of a 40-minute written qualifier and a single-elimination blackboard tournament.
West Virginia University recently announced the President's List (4.0 GPA) and Dean's
list (3.5-3.9999 GPA) for the 2021 fall semester. An impressive 24 physics/astro
majors made the
lists. The names of those students are shared below. Please take
a moment to congratulate them for their achievement!
Congratulations to Professor Aldo Romero on being named an Eberly Family Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy in recognition of his many contributions to advancing our department's mission.
A new study featured on the cover of the March 2021 issue of Physics of Plasmas is the first published research from WVU’s PHASMA experiment in the Center for Kinetic Experiment, Theory and Integrated Computation Physics.
“It is a fantastic honor to receive this. There have been so many scientists who
have been awarded this fellowship, many I respect and know. Being in the same category
as these people is just amazing,” Burke-Spolaor said. “It’s pleasing to be recognized
as an emerging leader in physics.”
One of the key questions in the study of relativistic jets is how magnetic reconnection occurs and whether it can effectively accelerate electrons in the jet. We performed 3D particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of arelativistic pair and electron-proton jet of relatively large radius that carries a helical magnetic field. We focused our investigation on the interaction between the jet and the ambient plasma and explore how thehelical magnetic field affects the excitation of kinetic instabilities such as the Weibel instability (WI), the kinetic Kelvin–Helmholtz instability (kKHI), and the mushroom instability (MI). In our simulations these kinetic instabilities are indeed excited, and....
