The recently formed University of Iowa Ethics Bowl team, led by second-year physics and chemistry student Arissa Khan, bested 20 competing teams in the Midwest.

Yuanzheng Wen, a graduate research assistant in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, received an Outstanding Student Presentation Award for his talk at the American Geophysical Union Annual Meeting Dec. 9-13, 2024 in Washington, DC.

In this Radio Iowa interview, Prof. Allison Jaynes discusses the discovery of 128 more moons orbiting Saturn, for a total of 274, far more than its larger neighbor Jupiter, with just 95 moons. Jaynes says she’s betting Saturn has still more moons that we haven’t spotted yet.

In this story from Iowa's News Now, Prof. Allison Jaynes comments on the discovery of 128 new moons around Saturn, making it the planet with the most moons with 274. She said these findings are a good stepping stone to learn more about the Earth's moon and solar system.

The Department of Physics and Astronomy presented Demos Unleashed 2025 on March 14 at Van Allen Hall. The show featured the science of the TRACERS Mission including making plasmas, aurora, magnetic detection, particle detection, and the science of rockets.

University of Iowa space physicist Craig Kletzing’s life was cut short before he could complete his most ambitious NASA mission. The professor’s colleagues stepped in to bring TRACERS to the launch pad.

Ava Reed, a student in the College of Engineering, spent her summer designing and constructing the mini replica of the NASA funded satellite mission.

Associate Professor Allison Jaynes explains to USA Today why there may be more northern lights – or aurora borealis –sightings as we near the spring equinox.

The Department of Physics and Astronomy hosted the second annual Acevedo Poster Contest March 4, giving participating students a chance to show how they used computing resources, tools, or techniques in their research.

In a recent article in Nature Communications, University of Iowa Prof. Yannick Meurice and colleagues reported the observation of a new quantum physics phase called the "floating phase," where the crystalline order is not “locked” to an underlying grid. The physical setup is a ladder-shaped array of Rubidium atoms proposed by Meurice as a quantum simulator to study the evolution of charged particles interacting with photons in the context of particle physics. The atoms are prepared in two states and can be interpreted as qubits.