Physics and Astronomy

Above: a YouTube video related to Dr. Lehmacher’s NASA VortEx rocket launched on 23 March 2023 from Andøya Space Center, Norway.

The video shows a very detailed simulation of the winds and waves over northern Scandinavia based on the actual weather conditions and including the time when we launched two sounding rockets. 

The high-resolution (1.2 km) weather simulation was made at the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) by a collaborator, Prof. Claudia Stephan, of Dr. Lehmacher at Clemson University from the Institute for Atmospheric Physics (IAP) at the University of Rostock and covers waves at heights up to 40 km. The waves are excited by winds blowing over the coastal mountains and propagate upward into the stratosphere. The goal of VortEx is the study of mixing effects from these waves at even greater heights, in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere, 50 to 120 km. This intermittent mixing can extend even further, to the region where the space station orbits (400 km) and the surrounding ionosphere and become part of our “space weather”.

Want to read more about this research? Read more here: 
Rocket launch could provide insight into how turbulence far above the planet’s surface affects our planet’s atmosphere | Clemson News

Clemson Department of Physics and Astronomy Professor, Feng Ding, and his international collaborators “have discovered a cause of blood vessel damage in the brain that plays a role in Alzheimer’s disease-related dementia.”

A healthy brain uses neurons to process and transmit information between parts of the brain to the muscles and organs within the body. Alzheimer’s disease disrupts this communication. Dr. Ding explains that the study unveils a new target for better Alzheimer’s treatments.

Read more here:
Research reveals cause of vascular changes associated with early Alzheimer’s  | Clemson News

Three members of Rao’s lab- Mihir Parekh, postdoctoral fellow, and graduate students Janak Basel and Nawraj Sapkota have discovered a way to optimize electrolytes to address the short circuiting and rapid capacity loss problems in sodium-ion batteries. These batteries are less expensive and more readily available than lithium-ion batteries. 

Read more here: 
Electrolyte research by Clemson physicists could lead to cheaper high-capacity batteries. | Clemson News

After analyzing more than 100 years of data, Clemson University astrophysicists, Pablo Penil del Campo, Marco Ajello, and Sagar Adhikari, may have found binary supermassive black holes. 

In our universe, galaxies collide with other galaxies and, in the process, the supermassive black holes at the core of the galaxes will form a pair. 

“Penil and his collaborators studied five blazars. He found that PG 1553+113, which Penil described as the most well-known blazar in the context of periodicity behavior, exhibited evidence of a 2.2 quasi-periodic oscillation in radio, optical, ultraviolet (UV) and gamma-ray bands.”

Read more here: 
Using a century of data, Clemson astrophysicists may have found a binary supermassive black hole | Clemson News

VJ Mattison and J Jones, undergraduate students in the Physics and Astronomy Department, presented their research at the CU2MIP. CU2MIP is the Conference for Undergraduate Underrepresented Minorities in Physics.

They presented their poster titled “Advancing Blazar and Galactic Source Identification with Multiwavelength and Machine Learning”.