Dale Stille was a co-presenter at a physics demonstration held in conjunction with the American Association of Physics Teachers Summer Meeting July 31- August 4.

Unlike the vast majority of astrophysical plasmas, the solar wind is accessible to spacecraft, which for decades have carried in-situ instruments for directly measuring its particles and fields. Though such measurements provide precise and detailed information, a single spacecraft on its own cannot disentangle spatial and temporal fluctuations.

Congratulations to Dr. Kenneth Heitritter on successfully defending his Ph.D. thesis!

Congratulations to Dr. Anindya Ghosh for successfully defending his Ph.D. thesis on July 16, 2021.

Jumpstarting Tomorrow, a hybrid pilot grant/community-building program, will support innovative and collaborative teams that could become the vanguard for future strategic research investments by the university. The initiative was made possible through $2 million in funding to RDO from the first round of disbursements related to the UI utility public-private partnership (P3).

Despite the enormous hurdles presented by the pandemic, the University of Iowa secured its highest-ever level of external funding for research, scholarship, and creative activities last year—including research contributing to the development of effective COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.

Duality, the nation’s first accelerator exclusively for quantum companies, has accepted six startups for Cohort 1. Duality is led by the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago and the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE), along with founding partners, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Argonne National Laboratory, and P33.

Casey DeRoo, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, will focus on building and measuring the performance of an optical element known as a diffraction grating. Diffraction gratings are used in conjunction with astronomical telescopes to form spectra, which show how the brightness of a source is divided up by energy.

As the Parker Solar Probe ventures closer to the sun, we are learning new things about our home star. In a new study, physicists led by the University of Iowa report the first definitive measurements of the sun’s electric field, and how the electric field interacts with the solar wind, the fast-flowing current of charged particles that can affect activities on Earth, from satellites to telecommunications.

University of Iowa physicists have won NASA funding to leverage their expertise in fabricating and testing gratings for use in the ultraviolet range in space-based astronomy. Keri Hoadley, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, is collaborating with Casey DeRoo, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, whose group has been honing a new way to fabricate reflection gratings for X-rays, which are at shorter wavelengths than ultraviolet light. Hoadley and her team will take advantage of that progress and try to apply it for ultraviolet light use.