Accomplishments: Department of Physics and Astronomy
Rebecca Martin (Physics and Astronomy) was awarded a NASA Exoplanets grant for $541,460 to study planet formation in binary star systems.
Daniel Proga (Physics and Astronomy) was awarded one of NASA's most prestigious research grants through the Theoretical and Computational Astrophysics Networks (TCAN) program. The grant totals $1,547,537 and will be shared with four other major research institutions: the Institute for Advanced Study, the NASA Goddard Space Flight…
Chao-Chin Yang (Physics and Astronomy) was awarded a multi-institutional research grant by NASA through the Theoretical and Computational Astrophysics Networks (TCAN) program. Led by New Mexico State University, other collaborators include UNLV, University of Arizona, Iowa State University, and SETI Institute in the United…
Ashkan Salamat (Physics and Astronomy) and a team of researchers have made a breakthrough in the long-sought-after quest for a room-temperature superconductor, what they call the “holy grail” of energy efficiency. The research team, which includes Ranga Dias from the University of Rochester, established room temperature superconductivity…
Zhaohuan Zhu (Physics and Astronomy) coauthored the article "A Triple-Star System with a Misaligned and Warped Circumstellar Disk Shaped by Disk Tearing," which has been published in Science.
Zhaohuan Zhu (Physic & Astronomy) has been selected as the editor for the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan (PASJ). The first term is two years and began July 1. Established in 1949, PASJ is an international journal that publishes the results of original research in all aspects of astronomy,…
Min Li (Physics and Astronomy) will have a new study appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society — a major international astronomy journal. She and her collaborators, UNLV's Jason Steffen, Zhaohuan Zhu (both Physics and Astronomy), and Shichun Huang (Geoscience), as well as Misha Petaev at Harvard, combined simulations of a…
PhD student Randall Dannen (Physics & Astronomy) has recently demonstrated a novel method to create clouds around black holes. To appear in May as a letter in the prestigious Astrophysical Journal, the work led by Dannen was co-authored with astronomy professor Daniel Proga (his PhD adviser), UNLV postdoctoral researcher Tim Waters,…
Bing Zhang (Physics and Astronomy) is the author of the book Physics of Gamma-Ray Bursts, which is one of four books selected for the 2020 Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) Awards in the Cosmology and Astronomy category. The PROSE awards honor scholarly works published in 2019. There were a total of 157 finalists across 49 subject…
Jason Steffen (Physics and Astronomy) was recognized as a 2019 "Highly Cited Researcher" by the Web of Science. This places him, by citations, in the top one percent of his field over the decade 2008 through 2018. Most of these citations come from his work in exoplanets, especially in conjunction with NASA's Kepler mission. …
Chao-Chin Yang, Zhaohuan Zhu, Stephen Lepp, and Xiao Hu (all Physics and Astronomy) just were awarded a $474,315 research grant by NASA through the Astrophysics Theory Program. They will conduct state-of-the-art computer simulations to model a circumstellar disk around a young star and study the dust-gas dynamics in the disk. The investigation…
Chao-Chin Yang, Zhaohuan Zhu and Stephen Lepp (all Physics and Astronomy) just were awarded a $456,315 research grant by NASA through the Emerging Worlds Program. They will investigate one of the most difficult stages in the course of planet formation, for example, how kilometer-scale planetesimals can be built from pebble-sized materials around a…