Accomplishments: Department of Physics and Astronomy
Bing Zhang (Physics and Astronomy) co-organized an Aspen Center for Physics conference titled, “Fast Radio Bursts: New Probes of Fundamental Physics and Cosmology” in February. The conference hosted approximately 80 scientists from around the world to discuss the nature of fast radio bursts, mysterious radio bursts discovered 10 years ago. The…
Zhaohuan Zhu (Physics and Astronomy) has been named a 2017 Sloan Research Fellow. He is one of 126 researchers from 60 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada — and the first UNLV scientist — to be awarded the prestigious fellowship for early career scholars considered the ‘next generation of scientific leaders.’
Zhaohuan Zhu (Physics and Astronomy) was named a 2017 Sloan Research Fellow. He is one of 126 researchers from 60 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada – and the first UNLV scientist – to be awarded the prestigious fellowship. Awarded annually since 1955 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the fellowships honor early-career scholars…
Qiang Zhu (Physics and Astronomy) recently had a research paper published in Angewandte Chemie. The paper, titled "The Structure of Glycine Dihydrate: Implications for the Crystallization of Glycine from Solution and Its Structure in Outer Space," looks at long-term puzzling crystal structure determination of glycine at low…
Zhaohuan Zhu (Physics and Astronomy) received a $444,188 grant from the NASA ATP (Astrophysics Theory Program) for Predicting Observational Signatures of Planet Formation in Realistic Models of Protoplanetary Disks .
He will hire a postdoc to be included in the research. The postdoc will work with Zhu and Jim Stone from…
Jason Steffen (Physics and Astronomy) will be a co-investigator on a $380,000 grant titled Architecture of Kepler's Multiple Planet Systems. He is working with Jack Lissauer of NASA Ames Research Center .
The project will study data from the NASA Kepler space mission to characterize the orbital properties of the thousands of…
Rebecca Martin (Physics & Astronomy) received a three-year, $297,116 grant from the NASA Exoplanets Research Program to study planet formation in binary star systems.
About half of observed exoplanets are estimated to be in binary star systems rather than around a single star like our Sun. Planet formation in binary star systems may be…
Bing Zhang (Physics & Astronomy) and Xuefeng Wu, former UNLV postdoctoral research associate now with Purple Mountain Observatory, China, and He Gao, a UNLV Ph.D. graduate now at Beijing Normal University, China, recently published a paper in Physical Review D to test Einstein’s weak equivalent principle using gravitational…
Jason Steffen (Physics and Astronomy) was a guest on NPR's Marketplace, talking about how to more efficiently board an airplane. He began researching the issue as a graduate student after being frustrated by slow boarding processes and flight delays.
The algorithm he used to find the optimal boarding method is called Markov Chain…
Michael Pravica (Physics and Astronomy) recently received a 2015 Stewardship Science Academic Alliances award through the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. The three-year, $780,000 grant is to develop a novel field of science Pravica has been developing, called "useful hard X-ray photochemistry."…
Ye Li and Bing Zhang (both Physics & Astronomy) recently published an article titled, "Can Life Survive Gamma-Ray Bursts in the High-Redshift Universe" in the Sept. 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. The work also was cited in a recent article in New Scientist.
In this paper, they investigated the “habitability” of…
Barbara Lavina (Physics & Astronomy) is the author of an article, "Unraveling the Complexity of Iron Oxides at High Pressure and Temperature: Synthesis of Fe5O6," which appeared in the June 26 issue of Science Advances.
Using laser heating in the diamond anvil cell and synchrotron microfocused X-ray beam, Lavina and Yue Meng from…