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…

Bing Zhang (Physics & Astronomy) received a $400,000 research grant from NASA's Astrophysics Theory Program. The grant is to support his research group in developing novel theoretical models of relativistic astrophysical jets in the magnetically dominated regime. The models will use a relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) code and conduct…

Bing Zhang (Physics and Astronomy) was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society. This high honor is restricted to 0.5 percent of the membership in a given year. He was nominated for his significant scientific contributions to the understanding of the physical mechanisms of high-energy astrophysical sources, especially the prompt emission…

Bernard Zygelman (Physics and Astronomy) has conducted research that recently was highlighted in Europhysics News, the magazine of the European Physical Society. The research shows how the development of cold hybrid ion-atom traps has enabled researchers to explore a new frontier; atom-ion interactions at temperatures below 1 K. The original…

Eunja Kim (Physics) and Ken Czerwinski (Chemistry) collaborated with Philippe Weck of Sandia National Laboratories on a research project that was selected as the Nov. 21, 2013, cover of the prestigious journal Dalton Transactions, which is the international journal for inorganic, organometallic, and bioinorganic chemistry. The article is "…

George Rhee (Physics and Astronomy) is the author of Cosmic Dawn: The Search for the First Stars and Galaxies (Springer 2013). The visible universe consists of stars and galaxies. One of the challenges of astronomy is to understand how galaxies and stars first came into existence more than 13 billion years ago. This book tells the story of our…

John Farley (Physics) gave a departmental colloquium at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (formerly University of Missouri, Rolla) in October. Titled "Beyond the Lecture: What Have We Learned from Physics Education Research?," the colloquium examined how conventional lecture-based instruction is surprisingly ineffective in…