UNH Physics Department - News 
Summer 2009: Profs. Lynn Kistler and Joachim Raeder were promoted to full professor, and Prof. Silas Beane was awarded tenure with promotion to associate professor. Prof. Roy Torbert has been selected to serve on NASA's top level Advisory Committee. Prof. Kai Germaschewski successfully led a 4-department effort to acquire an IBM cell cluster computer while forging a strategic computing alliance with IBM. In addition, 8 more grants from NASA, NSF, and NIH were awarded to Physics faculty over the past two months totaling $2.1 million. Graduate student Hyun-Ju Kim, who is working with Prof. Joachim Raeder on the solar wind magnetosphere interaction, received a "Best Poster" award at the 9th International School for Space Simulation.
August 2009: Cambridge University Press has published the first of a three volume set titled Heliosphysics: Plasma Physics of the Local Cosmos. The book is written for advanced undergraduate and graduate students interested in this evolving field. Two UNH professors are coauthors of the book. The author of Chapter 5 "Magnetic Reconnection" is Prof. Terry Forbes. The author of Chapter 7 "Turbulence" is Prof. Charles Smith.
August 2009: Undergraduates Colin Joyce and Joshua Stawarz joined recent graduate Jeffrey Tessein in attending the 2009 SHINE conference held in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Together they authored (either as first author or co-author) nine papers presented on topics ranging from the characteristics of solar wind turbulence and heating of the solar wind to the generation of waves by newborn interstellar pickup ions. They were joined by David Connick, a recent graduate of Colby College who is currently working in the Space Science Center, who presented his work on the current state of the solar minimum. The students were joined by Professors Bhattacharjee, Chandran, Forbes, Isenberg, Lee, Ryan, Smith, and Vasquez and Research Scientist Simunac.
July 2009: This month the Space Science Center hosted one of the modules in 2009 Project SMART - a program designed to offer high school students a very real and very advanced look at how science is done while it introduces them to the cutting edge of space science. Nine students participated in research projects ranging from the analysis of CLUSTER data to study both Crater FTEs and Magnetic Reconnection, the examination of the IBEX star tracker made by UNH and now in flight on the IBEX spacecraft, and the construction of a Faraday cup sensor of the type flown in many space missions. The students also built the payload for a high-altitude balloon that flew a video camera to 96,000 feet! Look here to see the view from 96,000 feet. Thank you to teachers Lou Broad and Scott Goelzer for their invaluable efforts and the many faculty and researchers of the UNH Physics Department who contributed their talents and made the program possible.
July 2009: The Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) completed its first full-sky map of the heliospheric boundary and has returned unexpected neutral atom observations from the Moon.
June 2009: NASA gave the go-ahead for its Magnetospheric Multi-Scale Mission (MMS) with a large instrument contribution from the group of Prof. Roy Torbert.
May 2009: Congratulations to graduate student Richard Woolf who won 3rd place for student presentations at this month's IEEE conference on Homeland Security in Waltham, MA.
May 2009: Congratulations to undergraduate Joshua Stawarz who published his first research paper this month: "The Turbulent Cascade and Proton Heating in the Solar Wind at 1 AU" by Stawarz, Smith, Vasquez, Forman, and MacBride [The Astrophysical Journal, 696, 1119-1127, 2009].
May 2009: Congratulations to undergraduate Physics majors who won university scholarships this month: Richard Messeder who won the Cutts Scholarship; Kyle Kalutkiewicz and Joshua Stawarz who both won Dalton Scholarships; Lee Peterson and Katelyn Giles who both won Dearborn Scholarships; Lauren Lazarus who won the Fearer Scholarship; Joshua Wood who won the Houston Scholarship; Kyle Snavely, Tuyen Nguyen, and Brian Collins who all won St. Onge Scholarships; and Joshua French who won the Zoochi Scholarship.
April 2009: As Program Director of the Hyperpolarized Media Magnetic Resonance Study Group of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, Prof. Bill Hersman organized the group's international meeting this past April. Next year he will serve as the group's president.
April 2009: Congratulations to the 14 Physics undergraduates who participated in this year's UNH Undergraduate Research Conference Interdisciplinary Science & Engineering Research Conference. Specifically, congratulations to George Clark, Travis Glines, Kyle Kalutkiewicz, Lauren Lazarus, Daniel Mannarino, Kyle Snavely, Samuel Meehan, Tuyen Nguyen, Morgan O'Neill, Brian Patenaude, Lee Peterson, Austin Purvis, Joshua Stararz, and Jeffrey Tessein. Everyone with experience at national and international scientific meetings continues to marvel at the quality of the research presented at this conference. Special congratulations go to Morgan O'Neill for winning two of only seven awards given and to George Clark who received a "Best Poster" award.
April 2009: Congratulations to undergraduate Joshua Woods on being awarded a Goldwater Fellowship! The Goldwater Fellowship is a highly competitive, academics-based national award given to only a select few students each year from across the country.
April 2009: Colby undergraduate David Connick visited the Space Science Center during the summer of 2008 to work on a project in collaboration with UNH professor Charles Smith and Boston University professor Nathan Schwadron involving the variation of toroidal solar flux with the solar cycle. His paper was published this month titled "The Flux of Open and Toroidal Interplanetary Magnetic Field as a Function of Heliolatitude and Solar Cycle,'' by Connick, Smith and Schwadron, The Astrophysical Journal, 695, 357--362, 2009.
March 2009: Two professors from the UNH Physics Department have been honored by the university for their contributions. Prof. Eberhard Moebius was named the recipient of this year's Distinguished Professor Award. At the same time Prof. Terry Forbes was awarded this year's Excellence in Research Award. The awards are given to one person each year in recognition of their scholarly activity. Congratulations to both.
March 2009: Profs. Connell, Lopate and McKibben, working in collaboration with Aurora Flight Sciences, were awarded a NASA contract to develop a compact charged particle spectrometer for use in manned space vehicles. The intent is to improve crew safety with enhanced radiation monitoring. The design is based on ADIS technology and instruments now in development for NOAA flights.
February 2009: Undergraduate Jeffrey Tessein published a paper in The Astrophysical Journal titled "Spectral Indices for Multi-Dimensional Interplanetary Turbulence at 1 AU" by Tessein, Smith, MacBride, Matthaeus, Forman, and Borovsky, 692, 684-693, 2009.
Winter 2008: Prof. Mark McConnell is serving as Davis Fellow, under the auspices of the Discovery Program. Alongside other faculty, he is developing an Inquiry course for Spring 2010. Prof. James Ryan was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society. Both have received NASA grants for the development of high altitude balloon payloads to study celestial gamma-rays. Peter Bochsler, emeritus from the University of Bern, is collaborating with colleagues in the Space Science Center on STEREO and IBEX. Graduate student Rebecca Barlow was selected one of 50 student ambassadors for 2009 International Year of Astronomy activities by NASA. For his PhD thesis under Prof. Karsten Pohl, on the driving forces behind the heterogeneity of ultrathin films, Jiebing Sun received this year's Morton M. Traum Award at the 55th International Symposium of the American Vacuum Society. Derya Deniz completed his PhD under Prof. James Harper on texture evolution in metal nitride thin films, and is now pursuing research on solid state gas sensors at the University of Maine.
October 2008: The Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) is launched. IBEX is now collecting the first all-sky map of energetic neutral atoms from the solar system boundary. Together with students, UNH investigators Eberhard Moebius, Harald Kucharek, and Martin Lee sift the data for clues on the surrounding interstellar medium.
June 2008: UNH Researchers Joachim Raeder, Kai Germaschewski, Doug Larson and Andrew Foulks put together 40 PlayStations to carry out numerical simulations of the earth's magnetosphere. For details see UNH Press Release
May 2008: Prof. Martin Lee received one of the prestigious UNH Presidential Professorships for 10 years for his outstanding research contributions. Prof. Eberhard Moebius was awarded the Class of 1940 Professorship for 3 years for excellence in research and interdisciplinary involvement.
May 2008: Bogdan Diaconescu won the Graduate School best Ph.D. thesis award for work on self-assembly of nano-structures on metallic surfaces under Karsten Pohl.
May 2008: An impressive number of our undergraduate students are involved in research. Many of them presented posters at the UNH Undergraduate Research Conference (URC) this April. Special congratulations go to undergraduate George Clark who won the award for the best poster in Physics with his presentation on the calibration of the Star Sensor on the IBEX satellite.
April 2008: Junior Morgan O'Neill will present a poster on her research in Warsaw last year at the Legislative Breakfast in Concord on April 9. Morgan has implemented a challenging software module to include the Moon as objects to use with our star sensor on IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer).
March 2008: Graduate student Derya Deniz has had a manuscript accepted by the Journal of Applied Physics: "Competitive Growth Mechanisms of Aluminum Nitride Thin Films Deposited by Off-Normal Reactive Magnetron Sputtering," by D. Deniz, T. Karabacak and J.M.E. Harper, to be published 2008.
March 2008: Undergraduate Vasiliy Vorotnikov published his first scientific paper in the AGU journal Space Weather entitled "Automated Shock Detection and Analysis Algorithm for Space Weather Application" by Vorotnikov, Smith, Hu, Szabo, Skoug, and Cohen.
January 2008: Prof. Li-Jen Chen published a paper in Nature Physics. The paper is entitled "Observation of energetic electrons within magnetic islands". UNH collaborators on the paper include Amitava Bhattacharjee, Pamela Puhl-Quinn, Hong-ang Yang, and Naoki Bessho. For details, see the UNH news release
January 2008: Graduate student Kathleen Hamilton published a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research called "Anisotropies and Helicities in the Solar Wind Inertial and Dissipation Ranges at 1 AU," by Hamilton, Smith, Vasquez, and Leamon.
December 2007: Recent graduate Benjamin T. MacBride presented a paper at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union titled "The Turbulent Cascade at 1 AU: Energy Transfer and the Third-Order Scaling for MHD," by MacBride, Smith, and Forman.
December 2007: Undergraduate Jeffrey A. Tessein presented a paper at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union titled "Asymmetry of Power Spectra for Interplanetary Fluctuations at 1 AU," by Tessein, Smith, and Borovsky. The paper was presented by coauthors due to a schedule conflict with final exams.
November 2007: UNH Professors Joachim Raeder, Lynn Kistler and Harald Kucharek just gained approval from NASA and the European Space Agency to organize a joint Cluster/ THEMIS workshop at UNH September 22-26. They expect about 150 attendees, mainly from the US, Europe, and Japan.
November 2007: Undergraduate Tuyen Nguyen receives UROP funding to work with Prof. Mark McConnell on "Integral Anaylsis of a 2.22 MeV Source Candidate".
November 2007: Prof. Ben Chandran was recently awarded a grant from NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Supporting Research and Technology Program to study the heating of the Sun's corona and the origin of the solar wind. The grant is entitled "Wave-Particle Kinetic Code for Coronal Heating."
October 2007: UNH graduate student Bogdan Diaconescu received the 2007 Morton Traum Award of the Surface Science Division of the American Vacuum Society during this month's international symposium. This is a very competitive and prestigious award, which is presented annually for the best student paper based on work leading to a Ph.D thesis. The papers are judged on technical content and quality of presentation.
September 2007 The (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) IBEX-Lo and -Hi sensors, which include substantial UNH hardware contributions, have been successfully tested and calibrated from April through September 2007. The complete IBEX payload has then been delivered for spacecraft integration to Orbital Sciences end of September. At this point (November 2007) both sensors have been integrated into the spacecraft bus. The IBEX program is well on track for launch mid June 2008, with more than one month reserve left in the schedule.
July 2007:The Center for Integrated Computation and Analysis of Reconnection and Turbulence (CICART) is funded by a $1.7 million dollar grant from the federal Department of Energy (DOE) beginning July 1, 2007. A team of scientists, including UNH Professors Amitava Bhattacharjee, Benjamin Chandran, Joseph Klewicki, Philip Isenberg, Bernard Vasquez, and Chung-Sang Ng and Dartmouth Professor Barrett Rogers, will develop theoretical and computer simulation models for applications from controlled thermonuclear fusion to the problems of turblence and heating in the Sun's environment. For more information, go to
Summer 2007: Junior Morgan O'Neill spent her summer at the Space Research Centre in Warsaw, Poland, funded with a a SURF Abroad grant from UNH. In collaboration with Dr. Maciej Bzowski, who is a co-investigator on IBEX and long term collaborator with Eberhard Moebius, she has written software that allows to include the moon as signpost for the accurate pointing of the IBEX-Lo sensor, using a UNH-built star sensor for IBEX. Precise pointing is important to derive accurately the flow speed and direction of the interstellar gas flow into the heliosphere.