Astronomers & physicists prepare for UNLV's new supercomputer

Several press articles have been written (see e.g., Review Journal, Tech Cocktail) describing UNLV's top-ranked new supercomputer, Cherry Creek, which is housed in Las Vegas' major data center company, Switch SUPERNAP.  Today several professors including Daniel Proga and Bernard Zygelman, as well as graduate students and postdocs who will be using Cherry Creek, attended a full day workshop at the Switch headquarters (hosted in cooperation with Intel with training provided by Colfax) to learn how to make optimal use out of Intel Xeon Phi processors.  Training included details on hardware design and parallel programming methodologies.

Sean Carroll will give the next Russell Frank Lecture on December 1st

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in 1993 from Harvard University. His research focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology, especially issues of dark matter, dark energy, spacetime symmetries, and the origin of the universe. Recently, Carroll has worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, and the emergence of complexity. Carroll is the author of The Particle at the End of the Universe, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, and Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Sloan Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Physics, and the Royal Society of London. Carroll has appeared on TV shows such as The Colbert Report, PBS's NOVA, and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, and frequently serves as a science consultant for film and television. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, writer Jennifer Ouellette.

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Prof. Proga makes headlines on UNLV's College of Sciences website.

Prof. Proga was recognized by the college of sciences for his recent NASA award.  A brief Q&A interview can be found here.

Prof. Rhee's TEDx talk is featured on UNLV's College of Sciences website.

Having published an astronomy book accessible to the general public, Prof. Rhee is continuing to communicate his science to a wider audience.  A short opinion piece and a TEDx talk given by Prof. Rhee can be found here.

Prof. Nagamine and Prof. Proga attended the Kavli IPMU Focus Week Workshop on HYPER-ACCRETION

Prof. Nagamine and Prof. Proga attended the Kavli IPMU Focus Week Workshop on HYPER-ACCRETION during April 7-11 in Kashiwa, Japan.

Accretion, at rates substantially in excess of the Eddington limit, is implicated in tidal disruption events, gamma-ray bursts, some X-ray binaries and supermassive black hole formation. Despite this ubiquity, the physical principles that govern hyper-accretion remain to be determined. Recent advances in numerical radiation hydrodynamics, along with observations of the time-dependence of hyper-accreting flows following tidal disruptions, offer new opportunities to make progress. The workshop is intended to facilitate interaction between observers and theorists working on hyper-accretion in different astrophysical systems, and to identify new directions for future research.

A new faculty member will soon join the Astronomy group!

The Physics and Astronomy department conducted an extensive faculty search and received over 100 applications for this tenure-track position. We are happy and excited to announce that Dr. Rebecca Martin will join the department next year. Dr. Martin earned her PhD with Professor Jim Pringle in Cambridge and was subsequently a research fellow at both STSI in Baltimore and JILA in Colorado. She is an expert in accretion theory applied to proto-planetary systems, and will have much to bring to UNLV.

Prof. Bing Zhang coauthors a paper in Nature Physics.

A paper by Z. Lucas Uhm and Prof. Bing Zhang, entitled "Fast cooling synchrotron radiation in a decaying magnetic field and gamma-ray burst emission mechanism", is published in Nature Physics. In this paper, the authors make a breakthrough in understanding the radiation mechanism of GRBs, which has been a subject of debate for years. The link of the paper can be found here.