“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....
A West Virginia University astrophysicist has been named a 2020 Highly Cited Researcher by Web of Science, one of the world’s top research awards. Maura McLaughlin, the Eberly Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, is one of 123 scholars recognized in the category of space science for research from 2009 to 2019. During this time, she authored or co-authored 192 articles that have been cited more than 13,000 times.
Underrepresented minority (URM) students have long been
underrepresented STEM fields, and the situation in physics and astronomy is
particularly critical, with only 6% of
PhDs awarded to Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students. Responding to the national
need to diversify these programs, the American Physics Society (APS) created a Bridge Program which has the dual
goals of increasing the fraction of PhDs awarded to URM students to the same
fraction as for bachelor’s degrees and improving the culture of graduate
education for all students, with particular emphasis on URM students.
The department is pleased to welcome our new class of 13 first
year graduate students, four of who are on university fellowships: Aleksandra Abova-Volkova, Joseph Benigno,
Victoria Blackmon (DuBois Graduate Fellowship), Graham Doskoch (University
Provost Fellowship), William Eshbaugh, Joe Kulikowski, Tyler Matheny, Amanda
Nemeth (University Provost Fellowship), John Pace (STEM Fellowship), Hasith
Perara, Andres Tellez Mora, and Braden Warr. This cohort is working in all our research
areas and comes from Kansas, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, Texas, Finland, Mexico, Sri Lanka, and, of course, West
Virginia.
Stepping down from his role as associate chair of the physics department, Duncan Lorimer has now been named Associate Dean for External Research and Development! He will take up this role from Spring 2019. You can read further about his appointment here:
Today West Virginia University
wish to congratulate the winners of the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics. This award
goes to Arthur Ashkin “for the optical tweezers and their application to
biological systems” shared with Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland “for their
method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses”
The American Association of Physics Teachers will be holding its 2018 Appalachian Section Meeting at the department of Physics and Astronomy from 12-13 October this year.
WVU professor Duncan Lorimer, along with an international team of astronomers, have used a triple star system consisting of a neutron star and two white dwarfs to test Einstein's age-old theory of gravity, general relativity. Read the full article here:Yet again, Einstein's theory passes the test with flying colors
