Articles from February 2022

Faculty and Staff: Submit grant awards, honors, research publications, accepted talks, and other news items through the faculty and staff news form.

Onel and Nachtman earn award for DUNE project

Thursday, February 24, 2022
Professor Yasar Onel and Professor Jane Nachtman have been awarded $14,553 from Fermi Research Alliance for a project entitled “Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE FD-2) CRP engineering support at FNAL and BNL Sites.”
aurora NASA

UI scientists hope NASA rocket will answer aurora questions in Alaska

Holed up in a cabin in the small northern Alaskan village of Venetie — which, according to the 2020 census, had a population of just 125 — University of Iowa doctoral candidate Riley Troyer is on a NASA-funded mission to sky gaze. His duties, actually, are much more specific and scientific, as he’s among a trio of University of Iowa investigators who over the weekend flew to Alaska on a three-week mission to better understand a rarely viewed type of aurora — also known as Northern Lights — that flashes or “pulsates.”

Aurora Mission Draws Troyer Home

In this radio interview from KUAC in Fairbanks, Alaska. University of Iowa PhD candidate Riley Troyer discussed the LAMP rocket mission which will probe pulsating aurora.
sounding rocket aurora NASA

UI team heads to Alaska to launch rocket into the Northern Lights

Friday, February 18, 2022
Scientists from the University of Iowa will travel to Alaska in February to launch the LAMP sounding rocket mission, designed to explore the energy of a pulsating aurora, one of the many forms of Northern Lights.
turbulent plasma around black hole

Physics Magazine Publishes Howes' Viewpoint Article

Thursday, February 17, 2022
Physics, the online magazine from the American Physical Society, published a viewpoint article by Associate Professor Greg Howes, "Illuminating Black Holes through Turbulent Heating." Predictions indicate that it should be possible to directly identify how turbulence heats a given black hole’s plasma from the spectrum of that plasma’s radiation.
einstein digital aquatint 4 images

Art and Physics Combine in UI First-Year Seminar

Thursday, February 17, 2022
In a featured article in the American Journal of Physics, Professor Yannick Meurice describes how he spurred interest in physics and computer science among artistically inclined students.
Helioswarm 1

Halekas Selected as Instrument Scientist for New NASA Mission

Monday, February 14, 2022
Associate Professor Jasper Halekas has been selected as instrument scientist for NASA's HelioSwarm, a $250 million Medium Class Explorer mission.
women in STEM vid

Department Celebrates International Day of Women and Girls in STEM

Thursday, February 10, 2022
To celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in STEM (Feb. 11), the Department of Physics and Astronomy had a conversation with women in its community.
Allison Jaynes  DI heliophysics award

Daily Iowan: Jaynes collaborates with UCLA, NASA on radiation belt research

Allison Jaynes, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Iowa, is researching to detect specific mechanisms that conduct higher energies in Earth’s radiation belts.

Hartley Receives $150,000 Award from Triad National Security

Tuesday, February 1, 2022
Assistant Research Scientist Dr. David Hartley has received a $150,000 award from Triad National Security for a project entitled “Using Van Allen Probes and Arase Density and Wave Data to Build a Model of Wave-Particle Interactions for Relativistic Electrons in the Inner Belt.”