Physics & Astronomy News
NASA's Kepler spacecraft has observed superflares
NASA's Kepler spacecraft has observed superflares on Sun-like stars thousands of times larger than the solar flares produced by our own Sun. Brad Schaefer points out that a similar superflare on our Sun could have disastrous consequences for us on Earth. Two 2000 papers by Schaefer suggested that superflares could be caused by interactions of stellar magnetic field lines with nearby planets, although this is not confirmed by the recent Kepler observations.
Gupt Receives Coates Fellowship
Brajesh Gupt, Graduate Student in the LSU Relativity Group, has received a Coates Fellowship.
Seidel Visits LSU
Edward Seidel, Assistant Director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the National Science Foundation(NSF), visited LSU July 13. He spoke to undergraduate students and teachers participating in summer research programs at LSU, and to high school students and teachers attending the Beowulf Boot Camp. Dr. Seidel presented a public talk at 3 p.m. in the Life Science Annex Auditorium (room A101) on LSU campus.
International Conference Held In Honor of Roy P. Daniels Professor and LSU Distinguished Research Master Jerry P. Draayer
More than 100 people, including some of the most prominent scientists from the U.S. and abroad, paid tribute to Draayer's world-wide recognized research and academic achievements, honored during Horizons of Innovative Theories, Experiments, and Supercomputing in Nuclear Physics, or HITES 2012, international conference held June 4 - 7 in the historic New Orleans French Quarter. The conference opening speech was offered by Prof. Michael Cherry (Chair, Department of Physics & Astronomy, LSU), and the meeting was closed by the director of Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL) Physics Division Dr. David Dean. Many Draayer's colleagues from LSU, LA Board of Regents, and Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA), as well as family members joined the celebratory ceremony in his honor. The closing speech was offered by Dean Kevin Carman, Dean of LSU's College of Basic Sciences, who acknowledged Draayer's contribution to our university.
Studying the Fundamental Properties of Neutrinos
Profs. Thomas Kutter, Martin Tzanov and William Metcalf (Emeritus) are studying the fundamental properties of neutrinos, the most ghostly and numerous of the basic building blocks of nature. Along with a LSU based team consisting of post-docs (Oleg Perevozchikov, Jonathan Insler, Flor Blaszcyk) and students (Jeremiah Haremza, Corey Myers) they perform this research in Japan, where their experiment is located. Their recent paper describing a new type of neutrino oscillations, that is the transformation of one type (or flavor) of neutrino into another has recently been selected by the French popular science magazine La Recherche (the French equivalent of Scientific American) for an award amongst many outstanding papers in all fields of science.
LSU Researchers Win $250,000 Grant to Probe Origins of the Universe
Parampreet Singh, assistant professor in the LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy, and Peter Diener, assistant research professor in the LSU Center for Computation & Technology and the LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy, recently received a $250,000 grant for a potentially breakthrough proposal hoping to answer questions about the earliest state of the universe. The grant, funded by the John Templeton Foundation sponsored the New Frontiers in Astronomy & Cosmology International Grant Competition, awarded more than $4 million in research grants to 20 scientists worldwide. NBC33-TV-Baton Rouge, LA • The Advocate • The Advocate:Opinion • KNOE8-TV-Monroe, LA • WTOV9-Ohio • HoumaToday • Daily Reville-Oct. 17, 2012 • El Pais (10 Oct 2012) Ciencia de ciencia ficción, Spain
Atomically Resolved Images of Spin Chirality
" Coupled structural and magnetic antiphase domain walls on BaFe2As2", Phys. Rev. B 86, 060512 (R) (2012) - Guorong Li, Xiaobo He, Jiandi Zhang, Rongying Jin, A. S. Sefat, M. A. McGuire, D. G. Mandrus, B. C. Sales and E. W. Plummer.
GPU Cluster
Mark Jarrell and colleagues have received funding from NSF for a GPU cluster, a Beowulf cluster based on multiple graphics processing units to be used for a variety of research and training projects.
IDC Announces New Winners of HPC Innovation Excellence Awards
A talk presented by Wayne Newhauser at the 2012 International Supercomputing Conference (ISC 12) in Hamburg, Germany was awarded an HPC Innovation Excellence Award. The paper described clinical trials performed via computer simulation "that would have been prohibitively expensive and taken longer to conduct with traditional methods." The joint LSU-Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center program "compared the effectiveness of multiple therapy options leading to better-informed clinical decisions" and resulting in estimated savings of over $100M in infrastructure and research costs.
Collaborative Research Highlighted by NSF
Collaborative research by Prof. Rodolfo Gambini of the University of the Republic of Uruguay, and Prof. Jorge Pullin of the LSU Relativity Group has been highlighted by the National Science Foundation (NSF) at RESEARCH.GOV
Thomas Corbitt has received an NSF CAREER Award
Thomas Corbitt has received an NSF CAREER Award
Pullin Appointed Advisory Board of Paper of Physics
Jorge Pullin has been appointed to the Advisory Board of the open access journal Paper of Physics, the only journal in physics to offer open peer review.
Grad student reaches stars
n January, LSU astronomers published a solution to a long-standing fundamental problem of astrophysics: what produces thermonuclear, or Type Ia, supernovae, which are tremendous explosions where the light is often brighter than a whole galaxy? LSU Professor of Physics & Astronomy Bradley Schaefer and graduate student Ashley Pagnotta have proven that these supernovae are caused by a pair of white dwarf stars. Their research was featured in Nature, one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world, considered quite a feat for a graduate student. But then, Pagnotta is no average student.
LSU CCT Receives Top Paper Award by HPDC
LSU CCT Receives Top Paper Award by HPDC (High Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing), the premier computer science conference for presenting new research. Physics and Astronomy Professor Ed Seidel and Adjunct faculty member, Gabrielle Allen were co-authors of the research paper.
Halo Nucleus Be11: A Spectroscopic Study via Neutron Transfer
A research team, led by a group from the Univ. of Tennessee and including Jeff Blackmon and Milan Matos from LSU, has elucidated the puzzling properties found in nearly pure neutron matter surrounding a short-lived atomic nucleus of beryllium. The "neutron halos" were produced in experiments at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in nuclei with 2 more neutrons than normal beryllium. The results show how the unusual properties of these halos originate from a mixing of a single neutron between two different quantum mechanical states.
LSU Team Wins NASA Robert H. Goddard Exceptional Achievement Outreach Award
A team at LSU has won a NASA Robert H. Goddard Exceptional Achievement Outreach award for the development of the Wallops Ballooning Experience for Educators (WBEE) program. WBEE was based upon the highly successful LaACES program, but adapted into a one week workshop for high school teachers. The first WBEE workshop was conducted during the summer of 2011 for 30 teachers from across the country. One of these teachers, Mark Arseneault from Zachary High School, then led a group of high school students to develop their own balloon payload which flew as part of the LaACES launch expedition in May 2012. The second WBEE will be held during July 2012. LSU personnel who participated in the WBEE program and received the NASA award include Brad Ellison, Jim Giammanco, Doug Granger, Greg Guzik, Steven Summerville, and John Wefel.
International Particle Accelerator Conference
The International Particle Accelerator Conference, or IPAC '12, was held in New Orleans in May. Sponsored by the Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society of IEEE and the American Physical Society's Division of Physics of Beams and hosted by LSU through its synchrotron light facility CAMD, the meeting was attended by over 1100 participants from across the world.