UC Berkeley Professor Burkhard Militzer shares great news: “Phase separation of planetary ices explains nondipolar magnetic fields of Uranus and Neptune.”
View NY Times article
View press release
View talk
Watch Adam Frank discuss this discovery and more on MSNBC
Kyla de Villa won the 2024 John C. Jamieson Student Paper Award
Kyla de Villa, a Ph.D. student in the Earth and Planetary Science Department at UC Berkeley, received the John C. Jamieson Student Paper Award in the 2024 Mineral and Rock Physics section.
Adrien Descamps
Queen’s University Belfast
September 13, 2024
4:00 – 5:00 PM ET
Sara Seager won the 2024 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics
Sara Seager, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, won the 2024 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics, “for their ground-breaking work on the discovery and characterization of extra-solar planets and their atmospheres.”
For “distinguished contributions to Condensed Matter Physics, particularly for his seminal groundbreaking work in high energy density science of matter at extreme pressures.”
This is the first time since 2009 that three faculty members have been elected in one year, as 2023 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Designation as an AAAS fellow is a distinguished lifetime honor within the scientific community.
A new theory for how oceans form on other worlds
Adam Frank explores how the study of exoplanets is transforming our understanding of ocean formation.
Under extreme pressures, matter defies the rules of physics as we know it.
Adam Frank writes in Big Think, “Scientists are studying ultra-high-pressure regimes in the Universe, not through traditional means like physical compression, but by using lasers. The Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester uses a powerful 60-beam Omega laser system to deliver concentrated energy to targets, mimicking the conditions of exoplanet interiors and star centers.”
On the Electride Nature of Na‐hP4
Racioppi, S., Storm, C. V., McMahon, M. I., & Zurek, E. (2023). On the Electride Nature of Na‐hP4. In Angewandte Chemie International Edition. Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.202310802
The problem with Jupiter
Ab initio determination of iron melting at terapascal pressures and Super-Earths core crystallization
González-Cataldo, F., & Militzer, B. (2023). Ab initio determination of iron melting at terapascal pressures and Super-Earths core crystallization. In Physical Review Research (Vol. 5, Issue 3). American Physical Society…
Yin, H., Shang, J. K., Blackman, E. G., Collins, G. W., & Aluie, H. (2023). Energy transfer and scale dynamics in 2D and 3D laser-driven jets. In Physics of Plasmas…
Allibert, L., Landeau, M., Röhlen, R., Maller, A., Nakajima, M., & Wünnemann, K. (2023). Planetary Impacts: Scaling of Crater Depth From Subsonic to Supersonic Conditions. In Journal of Geophysical Research:…
Militzer, B. (2023). Study of Jupiter’s Interior with Quadratic Monte Carlo Simulations. In The Astrophysical Journal (Vol. 953, Issue 1, p. 111). American Astronomical Society. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ace1f1
Dale, K. I., Rubie, D. C., Nakajima, M., Jacobson, S., Nathan, G., Golabek, G. J., Cambioni, S., & Morbidelli, A. (2023). An improved model of metal/silicate differentiation during Earth’s accretion.…
CMAP hosted a one-week residential program for undergraduates from colleges and universities across the country to learn more about the physics of extreme states of matter.
Thomas Duffy, professor of geosciences at Princeton University, was awarded as an American Geophysical Union College of Fellows Distinguished Lecturer in 2023-24, in Earth Interior, Mineral and Rock Physics for his abstract, “Journey to the Center of a Super-Earth.” He was also selected as a 2023 Mercator Fellow in the Matter Under Planetary Interior Conditions Research Unit by the German Research Foundation.
Ian Ocampo, a graduate student in the High-Pressure Mineral Physics Laboratory at Princeton University, has been awarded the 2023-24 Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Fellowship.
Structural and Thermodynamic Properties of Magnesium-Rich Liquids at Ultrahigh Pressure
González-Cataldo, F., & Militzer, B. (2023). Structural and Thermodynamic Properties of Magnesium-Rich Liquids at Ultrahigh Pressure. In Minerals (Vol. 13, Issue 7, p. 885). MDPI AG. https://doi.org/10.3390/min13070885
Danae Polsin received the 2023 Outstanding Young Alum Award from the SUNY Geneseo Alumni Association
Danae Polsin, a scientist in the High-Energy-Density Experimental Physics Group at the Laser Laboratory for Energetics and an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Rochester, received the 2023 Outstanding Young Alum Award from the SUNY Geneseo Alumni Association.
Spatio‐Temporal Coarse‐Graining Decomposition of the Global Ocean Geostrophic Kinetic Energy
Buzzicotti, M., Storer, B. A., Khatri, H., Griffies, S. M., & Aluie, H. (2023). Spatio‐Temporal Coarse‐Graining Decomposition of the Global Ocean Geostrophic Kinetic Energy. In Journal of Advances in Modeling…
Sara Seager received an honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Toronto in 2023
For her leadership in the fields of astrophysics and planetary science and as a leader in the field of exoplanet atmospheres, Sara Seager received a Doctor of Science, honoris causa, from the University of Toronto in June 2023.
Phase transitions and spin state of iron in FeO under the conditions of Earth’s deep interior
Greenberg, E., Nazarov, R., Landa, A., Ying, J., Hood, R. Q., Hen, B., Jeanloz, R., Prakapenka, V. B., Struzhkin, V. V., Rozenberg, G. Kh., & Leonov, I. V. (2023). Phase…
Specific Heat of Electron Plasma Waves
Rygg, J. R., Celliers, P. M., & Collins, G. W. (2023). Specific Heat of Electron Plasma Waves. In Physical Review Letters (Vol. 130, Issue 22). American Physical Society (APS). https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.130.225101
Militzer, B., & Hubbard, W. B. (2023). Relation of Gravity, Winds, and the Moment of Inertia of Jupiter and Saturn. In The Planetary Science Journal (Vol. 4, Issue 5, p.…
Second CMAP Annual Meeting
May 24, 2023
The second CMAP Annual Meeting, hosted at the University of Rochester on River Campus, was a gathering of the CMAP team partner organizations. We welcomed guests from California State University Northridge; University of Chicago; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; University of Illinois at Chicago; University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Sandia National Laboratories; University of California, Santa Cruz; Imperial College London; and University of Oxford.
Intercalating Helium into A-Site Vacant Perovskites
Racioppi, S., Miao, M., & Zurek, E. (2023). Intercalating Helium into A-Site Vacant Perovskites. In Chemistry of Materials (Vol. 35, Issue 11, pp. 4297–4310). American Chemical Society (ACS). https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.chemmater.3c00353
Maureen Zhang won second place in the category of physics and astronomy at ISEF Regeneron 2023
Maureen Zhang, a CMAP Research Experience for High Schoolers (REH) program alumna, won 2nd place in the category of physics and astronomy at ISEF Regeneron 2023, a highly competitive international science competition for high school students with nearly 3,000 student attendees. M. Zhang presented a machine learning project to determine the number of exoplanets in planetary systems.
Jupiter at its core remains a mystery to science
Adam Frank writes in Big Think, “For decades, planetary science was firm on the fact that Jupiter has a rocky core. New data extracted directly from the king of planets by the Juno spacecraft challenged that long-held standard.”
Jessica Shang selected as a 2022 Rochester Engineering Society Young Engineer of the Year Finalist
Jessica Shang, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Rochester was selected as a 2022 Rochester Engineering Society Young Engineer of the Year Finalist.
Wang, B., Hilleke, K. P., Wang, X., Polsin, D. N., & Zurek, E. (2023). Topological electride phase of sodium at high pressures and temperatures. In Physical Review B (Vol. 107,…
Lherm, V., & Deguen, R. (2023). Velocity field and cavity dynamics in drop impact experiments. In Journal of Fluid Mechanics (Vol. 962). Cambridge University Press (CUP). https://doi.org/10.1017/jfm.2023.297
Storer, B. A., & Aluie, H. (2023). FlowSieve: A Coarse-Graining Utility for Geophysical Flows on the Sphere. In Journal of Open Source Software (Vol. 8, Issue 84, p. 4277). The…
May 24-25, 2023
Rochester, NY
BY INVITATION ONLY
Why the observed spin evolution of older-than-solar-like stars might not require a dynamo mode change
Kotorashvili, K., Blackman, E. G., & Owen, J. E. (2023). Why the observed spin evolution of older-than-solar-like stars might not require a dynamo mode change. In Monthly Notices of the…
Ion and electron acoustic bursts during anti-parallel magnetic reconnection driven by lasers
Zhang, S., A. Chien, L. Gao, H. Ji, E. G. Blackman, R. Follett, D. H. Froula, J. Katz, C. Li, A. Birkel, R. Petrasso, J. Moody, and H. Chen. Ion…
Gong, X., D. N. Polsin, R. Paul, B. J. Henderson, J. H. Eggert, F. Coppari, R. F. Smith, J. R. Rygg, and G. W. Collins. X-Ray Diffraction of Ramp-Compressed Silicon to 390 Gpa. Physical Review Letters…
Afreen Syeda received an Outstanding Poster Award at the NNSA’s 2023 Stewardship Science Academic Programs Symposium
February 15, 2023
Afreen Syeda, a graduate student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Rochester, received an Outstanding Poster Award at the NNSA’s 2023 Stewardship Science Academic Programs Symposium in February 2023.
February 6, 2023
Miki Nakajima, assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester, is the recipient of a 2023 NSF CAREER award for her project, “CAREER: GLOW: Investigation on the evolution of magnetic fields of early Earth and beyond with cutting-edge research opportunities for future scientists.”