Congratulations to Suranga Ruhunusiri for successfully defending his PhD dissertation on "Investigation of Collective Phenomena in Dusty Plasmas."

"For Suranga’s PhD thesis he performed both experiment and theory. He built a new lab to carry out experiments with dust acoustic waves. These are compressional waves in a dusty plasma, which is an ionized gas that contains small charged particles of solid matter. In one experiment he discovered previously unknown synchronization states due to nonlinear effects. He designed another experiment to resolve a discrepancy in the theoretical literature: whether the material property called compressibility can have a negative value in a plasma. His theories included wave dispersion relations that he derived analytically. He also demonstrated a new way to analyze microscopic experimental data for melting in a dusty plasma, based on a method previously used only with computer simulations."
— John Goree, PhD advisor

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