Throughout the Fall Semester Space Science and CSPAR will be conducting a Colloquium. We invite both faculty and students to join us! Refreshments for the audience are served before the talk. Check for dates, speakers, and topics below. For further information on the Colloquium, please contact space_science_colloquium@uah.edu.

Important

In-person Colloquium will be held Fridays at 12:30pm in Cramer Hall (CRH) room 2096. Refreshments will be served for the audience at 12:00pm in the 2nd floor lobby. View Campus Map.

Parking: Visitors need to sign in at the Cramer Hall (CRH) front desk and have their ID in order to get a parking pass.

Date & Place: 2/21/2025
Speaker: Dr. Themis Cronis, Clinical Assiciate Professor, Physics, UAH
Title: Physics in Games

Abstract:

Feynman once remarked, “It is interesting why some people find science fascinating and others find it dull. One of the things that make science difficult is that it takes a lot of imagination”. But how can we expect students to develop this imagination when traditional methods of teaching physics rely on unimaginative, rote-based, and often tedious approaches?

As someone passionate about computer games, I have been a strong advocate for the gamification of physics over the past years. I have been part of a team that developed and tested Simphy (https://simphy.com), a unique platform that enables users to unleash their creativity by designing engaging, even wildly imaginative, physics experiments. This software provides real-time graphical and physical solutions, making abstract concepts more tangible and interactive.

I have fully integrated Simphy into all my undergraduate classes, as well as both in-person and online laboratory curricula, transforming how students engage with physics by fostering fun times, curiosity, experimentation, and deeper understanding. These efforts have culminated in the creation of an undergraduate physics textbook, which I aspire to see replace our current laboratory and course adoptions.

During the presentation, the audience can actively participate by accessing the links below. These links are how Simphy experiments show up in our UAH student Canvas’ as they are fully HTML enabled (i.e. embedded widgets). On different occasions, I am also providing an interactive Python code that compliments Simphy’s solution. In that sense, the students do not just “plug numbers” but discover the very nature of the physical and mathematical/numerical methods involved.

Demonstration Links:

Free body diagram: https://simphy.com/usersimulation?fbd-example-21275 

Physics of Angry birds: https://simphy.com/usersimulation?projectile-target-ssim-58417 

Box compressing a spring: https://simphy.com/usersimulation?energy-7a-51974

Centrifugal force: https://simphy.com/usersimulation?centrifuge-example-20668

Damped oscillations : https://simphy.com/usersimulation?damped-oscillations-20247

J.J.Thomson experiment : https://simphy.com/usersimulation?jj-thomson-18339

Charge orbitals: https://simphy.com/usersimulation?el-field-orbit-updated-17012

Kirchhoff: https://simphy.com/usersimulation?kirchhoff-1a-57932 

RL circuits: https://simphy.com/usersimulation?X_L_frequency-98169

Lenses: https://simphy.com/usersimulation?optics-demo-27580

 

Date & Place: 3/21/2025
Speaker: Dr. Gabe Xu, Professor, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, UAH
Title: Torsional Magnetic Reconnection for Space Propulsion

Abstract:

Magnetic reconnection is a well known phenomenon in astrophysical plasmas and occurs in the solar corona and Earth's magnetotail. Astrophysical plasmas have complex 3D magnetic structures which can produce magnetic null points and result in 3D reconnection events. This work is focused on a particular type of 3D reconnection called the torsional magnetic reconnection (TMR). TMR is one potential mechanism for solar flare and has been investigated theoretically and computationally since the early 2000s. Besides astrophysical cases, 3D reconnction also has potential application to space propulsion and inertial fusion, if the phenomenon can be produced in the lab. This talk presents a brief background on TMR and the current efforts to produce TMR in the laboratory scale for both fundamental science and as a potential space propulsion. The work is funded by the DOE and NASA.

Date & Place: 4/18/2025
Speaker: Dr. Jakobus Le Roux, Professor, Space Science, UAH
Title: Tempered Superdiffusion of Solar Energetic Particles in the Vicinity of a Quasi-perpendicular Heliospheric Shock at 1 AU

Abstract:

Jakobus A. le Roux, and Rubaiya K. Shikha

Perri, Zimbardo and coworkers have made the case in many publications that solar energetic particle (SEP) transport in the vicinity of heliospheric shocks can be superdiffusive as part of a superdiffusive shock acceleration process. A good example is the SEP event associated with the quasi-perpendicular shock that was observed on August 26, 1998 with the ACE spacecraft  at 1 AU (see Prete, Perri, and Zimbardo 2021). To investigate the claim of superdiffusive SEP transport at this event, we investigated the observed enhanced SEP fluxes and turbulent magnetic fields of this event in more detail. This was accomplished partly by fitting our analytical solution for tempered superdiffusive shock acceleration of SEPs at a perpendicular shock (le Roux and Shikha 2025) to the observed SEP fluxes for several energy channels upstream and downstream of the shock. Tempered superdiffusion indicates that the solution models SEP superdiffusion and its inevitable transition to normal diffusion further away from the shock (tempered Levy flights). The results indicate that SEP transport across the shock is clearly not diffusive, but can best be described as a tempered superdiffusive process. With the aid of the data fits we derived the fractional index for SEP tempered superdiffusion and found that SEPs are more superdiffusive at higher energies and downstream compared to upstream. The latter result was unexpected so we investigated the statistical properties of the non-Gaussian magnetic turbulence coinciding with the enhanced SEP fluxes. Preliminary results show that the kurtosis values of the turbulence are larger downstream (turbulence is more non-Gaussian and intermittent downstream) which might shed light on this issue. We identified where the transition from superdiffusion to normal diffusion potentially occurred in the SEP fluxes on both sides of the shock.

 

Fall 2024 colloquium schedule 

Spring 2024 colloquium schedule 

Fall 2023 colloquium schedule 

Spring 2023 colloquium schedule

 Fall 2022 colloquium schedule