Several students in the Department of Physics and Astronomy were candidates for degrees at the University of Iowa Fall Commencement ceremonies Dec. 15-16.

At an APS meeting in Denver, astrophysicist Allison Jaynes discussed her work on auroras and the strange plasma physics that shapes them. Jaynes, this year’s recipient of APS’s Katherine E. Weimer Award in plasma physics, discussed her research at this year’s meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics in Denver, Colorado.

Undergraduate physics student Jeff Leiberton was awarded a Student Presentation Prize for his poster presentation of "Towards Topological Magnons for Hybrid Magnonic Systems" at the 2023 Fall Meeting of the Prairie Section of the American Physical Society (APS) held Nov. 30 to Dec. 2 at the University of Missouri-Columbia. 

In December 2022, NASA's MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) mission observed the dramatic and unexpected "disappearance" of a stream of charged particles constantly emanating off the Sun, known as the solar wind. This was caused by a special type of solar event that was so powerful, it created a void in its wake as it traveled through the solar system.

Prof. Jasper Halekas leads research to explain the solar wind’s disappearance on Mars.

Prof. Jun Wang, who holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, is Iowa’s lead investigator on Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring Pollution or TEMPO. The space instrument is expected to help scientists understand the sources of pollution by revolutionizing how real-time air quality data is collected.

Professor Greg Howes has received a NASA Heliophysics Supporting Research grant to support supercomputer simulations and analysis of spacecraft data to better understand how particles in space are accelerated to high energy.

Associate Professor Allison Jaynes has received a $44,018 award from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory to support the development of a University of Iowa energetic particle detector instrument for a CubeSat concept mission to study energetic precipitation into the atmosphere from space, particularly during times of a widespread, common type of aurora called pulsating aurora.

Three Physics and Astronomy students presented posters at the Fall Undergraduate Research Festival (FURF) on Nov. 8 at the University Capitol Centre.

The Alpha chapter of Phi Beta Kappa has invited seven Physics and Astronomy undergraduates to join the society, the oldest and most prestigious undergraduate honors organization in the United States. The undergraduates are Eric Biedke, Ryan Dunn, Jeffry Lieberton, Aditya Desai, Philippe Jay, Emerson Peters, Brandon Stephanie.