Plasma

Peter Weix remembered for his technical, mentoring, and outreach efforts in physics

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The Department of Physics mourns the loss of Peter Weix, who passed away January 13, 2023.

Peter began his career as an electronics technician in the U.S. Navy in 1984, where he serv­­ed until 1990. Following his Navy service, he worked as an electronics technician for several companies in California before joining the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford. At SLAC he was a Senior Technician with involvement on both the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource and what is now the Linac Coherent Light Source. He also served as a Safety Officer with special emphasis on earthquake safety. Peter and his wife, Sheri, relocated to Wisconsin in 2001 so that Peter could join the Plasma Physics Group at UW–Madison where he worked for more than 20 years and advanced to Senior Instrumentation Specialist.

a man stands behind a lectern with physics gadgets behind him. he is wearing a costume that centers around the theme of time.
Peter Weix at the 2020 The Wonders of Physics annual shows | DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS

Peter’s work responsibilities at UW spanned a diverse range of technical operations for both the Madison Symmetric Torus (MST) and the Big Red Plasma Ball (BRB), two intermediate-scale experimental facilities for plasma physics research. He oversaw the mechanical and electrical aspects of the MST facility and its high-voltage pulsed-power systems, making sure the facility functioned as required, both technically and safely. He also oversaw all aspects of the high vacuum systems for both MST and BRB. There are many researchers, both in the local group and visiting collaborators, who relied on Peter’s efforts to make sure research projects stayed on track. Additionally, Peter directed key parts of large construction projects, such as the new programmable power supplies that replace MST’s passive capacitor-inductor circuits.

Peter’s involvement with plasma physics research included supervision of around 4-6 undergraduate students at any given time; he mentored an estimated more than 50 students during his time here. The students came from many areas of study, not just science and engineering, and rarely joined the group with the specific skills required to support research activities. Peter welcomed them into the department and provided them all with on-the-job training, teaching them skills and tricks of the trade to allow them to grow and become valuable members of the team.

In addition to his dedicated service to the plasma group, Peter recognized the importance and value of physics outreach. He became a vital member of The Wonders of Physics program for over twenty years. His involvement started when one of the participants was suddenly unavailable at the start of one of the public shows. Peter saved the day by learning on the fly how to operate the complicated audiovisual system. His performance under pressure was impressive, and he was then asked to be the coordinator and main announcer for the approximately 200 shows that followed. Through the years, he provided ideas, elaborate props, personnel, wisdom, and a calming influence on the entire cast. He spent countless hours volunteering his time to the program.

In recognition of his many contributions to the department and university, Peter was awarded the 2022-23 George Ott award for staff excellence, the only department-level staff award given. He will be recognized at the annual Awards and Scholarship banquet in May.

Please visit the department’s tribute page to Peter Weix to submit and/or read stories from Peter’s colleagues.

Profs. John Sarff and Clint Sprott contributed to this piece

Zweibel receives Astronomical Society of the Pacific’s most prestigious award

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This post is adapted from an Astronomical Society of the Pacific press release

The Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) has awarded the 2022 Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal to Ellen Zweibel. It is the most prestigious award given by ASP.

profile photo of Ellen Zweibel
Ellen Zweibel, W. L. Kraushaar professor of astronomy and physics (Photo by Althea Dotzour / UW–Madison)

Zweibel, the William L. Kraushaar professor of astronomy and physics at UW–Madison, was recognized for her contributions to the understanding of astrophysical plasmas, especially those associated with the Sun, stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters. She has also made major contributions in linking plasma characteristics and behaviors observed in laboratories to astrophysical plasma phenomena occurring in the universe.

Most plasma effects in astrophysical systems are due to an embedded magnetic field. Many of them can be grouped into a small number of basic physical processes: how magnetic fields are generated, how they exchange energy with their environments (sometimes on explosively fast timescales), their role in global instabilities, how they cause a tiny fraction of thermal particles to be accelerated to relativistic energies, and how they mediate the interaction of these relativistic particles (cosmic rays) with their gaseous environments through waves and instabilities on microscales. Although all these processes occur in laboratory plasmas, it is in natural plasmas that they take their most extreme forms. Zweibel and her students and postdocs have used analytical theory and numerical simulations to study the generation and evolution of magnetic fields in the Sun and other stars, in galaxies, and in galaxy clusters, and have researched the effects of high energy cosmic ray particles in all of these environments. Their most recent work centers on the role of cosmic rays in star formation feedback: the self-regulation of the star formation rate in galaxies through energy and momentum input to the ambient medium by the stars themselves.

a gold medal that says astronomical society of the pacific around the rim and has an antiquity-looking woman and other details
The Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal (photo from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific)

Zweibel has authored over 242 refereed publications with over 8,000 citations. In 2016 she was awarded the American Physical Society’s James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics “For seminal research on the energetics, stability, and dynamics of astrophysical plasmas, including those related to stars and galaxies, and for leadership in linking plasma and other astrophysical phenomena.” She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Astronomical Society of the Pacific’s Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal was established in 1898 by Catherine Wolfe Bruce, an American philanthropist and patroness of astronomy. The ASP presents the medal annually to a professional astronomer in recognition of a lifetime of outstanding achievement and contributions to astrophysics research. It was first awarded in 1898 to Simon Newcomb. Previous recipients of the Bruce Medal include Giovanni V. Schiaparelli (1902), Edwin Hubble (1938), Fred Hoyle (1970), and Vera Rubin (2003)

Magnetic fields implicated in the mysterious midlife crisis of stars

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a brightly colored sun with a cutout showing into the core, with lines suggesting the spinning motion
Artist’s impression of the spinning interior of a star, generating the stellar magnetic field. This image combines a dynamo simulation of the Sun’s interior with observations of the Sun’s outer atmosphere, where storms and plasma winds are generated. | Credit:
CESSI / IISER Kolkata / NASA-SVS / ESA / SOHO-LASCO

This post was originally published by the Royal Astronomical Society. UW–Madison physics graduate student Bindesh Tripathi is the lead author of the scientific publication.

Middle-aged stars can experience their own kind of midlife crisis, experiencing dramatic breaks in their activity and rotation rates at about the same age as our Sun, according to new research published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters. The study provides a new theoretical underpinning for the unexplained breakdown of established techniques for measuring ages of stars past their middle age, and the transition of solar-like stars to a magnetically inactive future.

Astronomers have long known that stars experience a process known as ‘magnetic braking’: a steady stream of charged particles, known as the solar wind, escapes from the star over time, carrying away small amounts of the star’s angular momentum. This slow drain causes stars like our Sun to gradually slow down their rotation over billions of years.

In turn, the slower rotation leads to altered magnetic fields and less stellar activity – the numbers of sunspots, flares, outbursts, and similar phenomena in the atmospheres of stars, which are intrinsically linked to the strengths of their magnetic fields.

profile photo of Bindesh Tripathy
Bindesh Tripathi

This decrease in activity and rotation rate over time is expected to be smooth and predictable because of the gradual loss of angular momentum. The idea gave birth to the tool known as ‘stellar gyrochronology’, which has been widely used over the past two decades to estimate the age of a star from its rotation period.

However recent observations indicate that this intimate relationship breaks down around middle age. The new work, carried out by Bindesh Tripathi at UW–Madison and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Kolkata, India, provides a novel explanation for this mysterious ailment. Prof. Dibyendu Nandy, and Prof. Soumitro Banerjee of IISER are co-authors.

Using dynamo models of magnetic field generation in stars, the team show that at about the age of the Sun the magnetic field generation mechanism of stars suddenly becomes sub-critical or less efficient. This allows stars to exist in two distinct activity states – a low activity mode and an active mode. A middle aged star like the Sun can often switch to the low activity mode resulting in drastically reduced angular momentum losses by magnetized stellar winds.

Prof. Nandy comments: “This hypothesis of sub-critical magnetic dynamos of solar-like stars provides a self-consistent, unifying physical basis for a diversity of solar-stellar phenomena, such as why stars beyond their midlife do not spin down as fast as in their youth, the breakdown of stellar gyrochronology relations, and recent findings suggesting that the Sun may be transitioning to a magnetically inactive future.”

The new work provides key insights into the existence of low activity episodes in the recent history of the Sun known as grand minima – when hardly any sunspots are seen. The best known of these is perhaps the Maunder Minimum around 1645 to 1715, when very few sunspots were observed.

The team hope that it will also shed light on recent observations indicating that the Sun is comparatively inactive, with crucial implications for the potential long-term future of our own stellar neighbor.

Physics projects funded in first round of UW’s Research Forward initiative

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In its inaugural round of funding, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education’s (OVCRGE) Research Forward initiative selected 11 projects, including two with physics department faculty involvement.

OVCRGE hosts Research Forward to stimulate and support highly innovative and groundbreaking research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The initiative is supported by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) and will provide funding for 1–2 years, depending on the needs and scope of the project.

The two projects from the department are:

Research Forward seeks to support collaborative, multidisciplinary, multi-investigator research projects that are high-risk, high-impact, and transformative. It seeks to fund research projects that have the potential to fundamentally transform a field of study as well as projects that require significant development prior to the submission of applications for external funding. Collaborative research proposals are welcome from within any of the four divisions (Arts & Humanities, Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, Social Sciences), as are cross-divisional collaborations.

Ellen Zweibel elected AAAS Fellow

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Congrats to Astronomy and Physics professor Ellen Zweibel on her election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was elected “for distinguished contributions to quantify the role of magnetic fields in shaping the cosmos on all scales.” Read the full story about all six UW–Madison faculty who earned this honor.

Cary Forest, Jay Anderson, and John Wallace part of WARF Innovation Awards finalist team

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profile photo of Cary Forest

Each fall the WARF Innovation Awards recognize some of the best of inventions at UW-Madison.

WARF receives hundreds of new invention disclosures each year. Of these disclosures, the WARF Innovation Award finalists are considered exceptional in the following criteria:

Criteria

  • Has potential for high long-term impact
  • Presents an exciting solution to a known important problem
  • Could produce broad benefits for humankind

Cary Forest, Jay Anderson, and John Wallace are part of one of six finalists teams selected by WARF for their disclosure, “High-Energy Plasma Generator for Medical Isotope Production, Nuclear Waste Disposal & Power Generation.” Watch Video

Two Innovation Award winners will receive $10,000, split among UW inventors, and will be named at a virtual ceremony December 8. Learn more and register for the event.

See all six finalists and watch their videos at WARF’s Innovation Awards website.

New study provides understanding of astrophysical plasma dynamics

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Stars, solar systems, and even entire galaxies form when astrophysical plasma — the flowing, molten mix of ions and electrons that makes up 99% of the universe — orbits around a dense object and attaches, or accretes, on to it. Physicists have developed models to explain the dynamics of this process, but in the absence of sending probes to developing stars, the experimental confirmation has been hard to come by.

In a study published in Physical Review Letters September 25, University of Wisconsin–Madison physicists recreated an astrophysical plasma in the lab, allowing them to investigate the plasma dynamics that explain the accretion disk formation. They found that electrons, not the momentum-carrying ions, dominate the magnetic field dynamics in less dense plasmas, a broad category that includes nearly all laboratory astrophysical plasma experiments.

plasma from a sun-like star in the upper left corner is coming out like a string that swirls like a whirlpool around a dot in the center of the image
An artist’s conception of the accretion disk | Credit: P. Marenfeld/NOAO/AURA/NSF

Like water swirling around and down an open drain, plasma in an accretion disk spins faster nearer the heavy object in the center than further away. As the plasma falls inward, it loses angular momentum. A basic physics principle says that angular momentum needs to be conserved, so the faster rotating plasma must be transferring its momentum away from the center.

“This is an outstanding problem in astrophysics — how does that angular momentum get transported in an accretion disk?” says Ken Flanagan, a postdoctoral researcher with the department of physics at UW–Madison and lead author of the study.

The simplest explanation is friction, but it was ruled out when the corresponding accretion times, in some cases, would be longer than the age of the universe. A model developed by theoretical physicists posits that turbulence, or the chaotic changes in plasma flow speeds, can explain the phenomenon on a more realistic time scale.

“So ad hoc, astrophysicists say, ‘Okay, there’s this much turbulence and that explains it,’” Flanagan says. “Which is good, but you need to call in the plasma physicists to piece together where that turbulence comes from.”

Flanagan and colleagues, including UW­–Madison physics professor Cary Forest, wanted to build off an idea that the turbulence was coming from an intrinsic property of some plasmas known as magnetorotational instability. This instability is seen in plasmas that are flowing fastest near the center and are in the presence of a weak magnetic field.

“And it’s lucky because there are weak magnetic fields all around the universe, and the flow profile in the accretion disks is set by the gravitational force,” Flanagan says. “So, we thought this plasma instability could be responsible for turbulence, and it explains how accretion disks work.”

To investigate if this intrinsic plasma instability explained the observation, the researchers turned to the Big Red Ball (BRB), a three-meter-wide hollow sphere with a 3000 magnets at its inner surface and various probes inside. They activate a plasma by ionizing gas inside the BRB, then applying a current to drive its movement.

a 3-meter-diameter sphere, painted red and with tons of probes all around it
The Big Red Ball is one of several pieces of scientific equipment being used to study the fundamental properties of plasma in order to better understand the universe, where the hot, ionized gas is abundant. | Photo by Jeff Miller / UW–Madison)

Because they had previously been encountering problems in driving very fast flows, they tried a new technique to drive the flow across the entire volume of plasma, as opposed to just the edges. Fortuitously, the BRB had magnetic field probes from a previous experiment still attached, and when they activated the plasma under these conditions, they found that this new flow setup amplified the magnetic field strength with a peak at the center nearly twenty times the baseline strength.

“We didn’t expect to see that at all, because usually in plasma physics the simplest model is to think of plasmas as one fluid with the heavier ions dominating momentum,” Flanagan says. “The results suggested that the plasma is in the Hall regime, which means the electrons and their motion are entirely responsible for the plasma moving around magnetic fields.”

If they were correct in assuming it was the Hall effect that was driving magnetic field amplification, the equations governing magnetic fields and electric currents say that if you drive the current in the opposite direction, the strength of the magnetic field would be canceled out. So, they switched the current and measured the magnetic field strength: it was zero, supporting the Hall regime explanation.

While the results are not directly applicable to the plasma accretion disks around, say, a very dense black hole, they do directly impact the earth-bound experiments that attempt to recreate and study them.

“Nearly all plasma astrophysical experiments operate in the Hall regime, and so this sort of large qualitative effect is something you’re going to have to pay attention to when you make these sorts of flows in laboratory astrophysical plasmas,” Flanagan says. “In that sense, this work has a pretty broad impact for lots of different research areas.”

This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (#1518115) and by the U.S. Department of Energy (#DE-SC0018266).

New study expands types of physics, engineering problems that can be solved by quantum computers

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A well-known quantum algorithm that is useful in studying and solving problems in quantum physics can be applied to problems in classical physics, according to a new study in the journal Physical Review A from University of Wisconsin–Madison assistant professor of physics Jeff Parker.

Quantum algorithms – a set of calculations that are run on a quantum computer as opposed to a classical computer – used for solving problems in physics have mainly focused on questions in quantum physics. The new applications include a range of problems common to physics and engineering, and expands on the types of questions that can be asked in those fields.

profile photo of Jeff Parker
Jeff Parker

“The reason we like quantum computers is that we think there are quantum algorithms that can solve certain kinds of problems very efficiently in ways that classical computers cannot,” Parker says. “This paper presents a new idea for a type of problem that has not been addressed directly in the literature before, but it can be solved efficiently using these same quantum computer types of algorithms.”

The type of problem Parker was investigating is known as generalized eigenvalue problems, which broadly describe trying to find the fundamental frequencies or modes of a system. Solving them is crucial to understanding common physics and engineering questions, such as the stability of a bridge’s design or, more in line with Parker’s research interests, the stability and efficiency of nuclear fusion reactors.

As the system being studied becomes more and more complex — more components moving throughout three-dimensional space — so does the numerical matrix that describes the problem. A simple eigenvalue problem can be solved with a pencil and paper, but researchers have developed computer algorithms to tackle increasingly complex ones. With the supercomputers available today, more and more difficult physics problems are finding solutions.

“If you want to solve a three-dimensional problem, it can be very complex, with a very complicated geometry,” Parker says. “You can do a lot on today’s supercomputers, but there tends to be a limit. Quantum algorithms may be able to break that limit.”

The specific quantum algorithm that Parker studied in this paper, known as quantum phase estimation, had been previously applied to so-called standard eigenvalue problems. However, no one had shown that they could be applied to the generalized eigenvalue problems that are also common in physics. Generalized eigenvalue problems introduce a second matrix that ups the mathematical complexity.

Parker took the quantum algorithm and extended it to generalized eigenvalue problems. He then looked to see what types of matrices could be used in this problem. If the matrix is sparse ­— meaning, if most of the numerical components that make it up are zero — it means this problem could be solved efficiently on a quantum computer.

The study shows that quantum algorithms could be applied to classical physics problems, such as nuclear fusion mirror machines. | Credit: Cary Forest

“What I showed is that there are certain types of generalized eigenvalue problems that do lead to a sparse matrix and therefore could be efficiently solved on a quantum computer,” Parker says. “This type includes the very natural problems that often occur in physics and engineering, so this study provides motivation for applying these quantum algorithms more to generalized eigenvalue problems, because it hasn’t been a big focus so far.”

Parker emphasizes that quantum computers are in their infancy, and these classical physics problems are still best approached through classical computer algorithms.

“This study provides a step in showing that the application of a quantum algorithm to classical physics problems can be useful in the future, and the main advance here is it shows very clearly another type of problem to which quantum algorithms can be applied,” Parker says.

The study was completed in collaboration with Ilon Joseph at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Funding support was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC52-07NA27344 and U.S. DOE Office of Fusion Energy Sciences “Quantum Leap for Fusion Energy Sciences” (FWP SCW1680).