UNLV Physics & Astronomy Host the Athena++ 2019 Workshop

Asst. Astronomy Professor Zhaohuan Zhu, along with Professors Jim Stone of Princeton University and Kengo Tomida of Osaka University, have organized the first ever developer and user meeting for the popular and publicly available general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (GR-MHD) code Athena++. Over 60 scientists from around the world joined the meeting, which was hosted in UNLV's new Hospitality Hall. The local organizing committee (LOC) consisted of Drs. Zhaohuan Zhu and Daniel Proga, as well as post-doc Dr. Chao-Chin Yang and UNLV alum Dr. Tim Waters (PhD 2017). It is hoped that this is the first of many successful meetings to come. Movies of state-of-the-art simulations presented at the workshop will be hosted on the meeting website.

Dr. Phil Armitage. No Place Like Home: Building Extrasolar Planets. 7:30PM Thurs. November 8, 2018.

The Russell Frank Astronomy Lecture Series
UNLV Physics and Astronomy Department
7:30PM Thursday November 8, 2018
Bigelow Physics Building 102

Revolutionary observational advances mean that extrasolar planetary systems are now two a penny, but few look like our own Solar System. The lecture will describe what we know about how planetary systems form, and highlight recent discoveries that may show planets caught in the act of forming. We will discuss the prospects for first finding, and then characterizing, other planets that could host life.

This talk is intended for a general audience including enthusiasts of all backgrounds and ages.

Dr. Mario Livio. The Golden Ratio. 7:30PM Thurs. October 18, 2018.

UNLV Physics and Astronomy Public Lecture
7:30PM Thursday October 18, 2018
Bigelow Physics Building 102

Dr. Mario Livio, an internationally known astrophysicist and best-selling author will talk about the Golden Ratio.

The number 1.618 known as “The Golden Ratio,” has fascinated scholars since antiquity. Some even considered it to be divine, and others were obsessed with it. In this talk I will describe the incredible history of this number, and its uncanny appearances, true and false, in natural phenomena, in the arts, in mathematics, and in human-created artifacts.

This talk is intended for a general audience including enthusiasts of all backgrounds and ages.

Dr Zhaohuan Zhu's paper in Astrophysical Journal featured on AAS Nova

Turbulent accretion disk density.

From the AAS Nova post, the image shows the density of a turbulent accretion disk in one of the first in-depth, three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations of a thin disk threaded by a large-scale vertical magnetic field. Accretion disks — which include everything from protoplanetary disks to disks around supermassive black holes — are notoriously challenging to model. Both small-scale turbulence and large-scale magnetic fields are thought to be critical processes governing motions within the disk, accretion of material, and launching of disk outflows — but capturing both of these different scales simultaneously in simulations is very difficult. The image above shows computations by Zhaohuan Zhu (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) and James Stone (Princeton University) that span three orders of magnitude in radius, extend all the way to the pole, and are evolved for more than 1,000 innermost orbits. The behavior the authors find is widely applicable to many different kinds of accretion disk systems.

The Article:

Zhaohuan Zhu and James M. Stone 2018 ApJ 857 34. doi:10.3847/1538-4357/aaafc9 Global Evolution of an Accretion Disk with a Net Vertical Field: Coronal Accretion, Flux Transport, and Disk Winds

Dr. Qiang Zhu published in Nature Communications

Qiang Zhu published an article, Predicting Phase Behavior of Grain Boundaries with Evolutionary Search and Machine Learning, in Nature Communications. The study of grain boundary phase transitions is an emerging field until recently dominated by experiments. Zhu, along with collaborators at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, developed a computational tool based on evolutionary algorithms that performs efficient grand-canonical grain boundary structure search. Its application to a model system of symmetric tilt boundaries in Cu uncovers an unexpected rich polymorphism in the grain boundary structures. The results demonstrate that the grain boundaries within the entire misorientation range have multiple phases and exhibit structural transitions, suggesting that phase behavior of interfaces is likely a general phenomenon.

doi:10.1038/s41467-018-02937-2

Dr. Zhaohuan Zhu named 2016-2017 College of Sciences Distinguished Researcher

College of Sciences 2016-2017 Distinguished Researcher Award

Dr. Zhu joined the UNLV faculty in 2016 as an assistant professor. He is a theoretical astrophysicist whose research focuses on understanding physics of astrophysical fluids, planet formation, and accretion processes in astrophysical disks around black holes, compact objects, and young stars and planets.

Dr. Zhu already has made tremendous contributions to UNLV, as evidenced by being the first UNLV scientist to earn the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship that honors early-career scholars whose achievements mark them as the next generation of scientific leaders, as well as receiving two major research grants, including a prestigious NSF five-year early CAREER award and a three-year NASA Astrophysical Theory (ATP) grant.

Bill O'Donnell named 2016-2017 College of Sciences Distinguished Professional Staff member

2016-2017 College of Sciences Distinguished Professional Staff Award

Mr. O’Donnell has been a UNLV employee since 1996, serving as a Research Associate/Design Engineer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

His duties include designing computer hardware and software, designing analog and digital instruments for researchers, maintaining electronics shops, repairing equipment, teaching electronics classes, and training students. He has tirelessly contributed to the department in many ways, and has maintained the productive research activities in the department.