UNH Physics Department - News 
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. 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. 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. Undergraduate George Clark 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.