Faculty and Staff

Biography

Dr. Ratan Kumar Bera is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center of Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research (CSPAR) in the Dept. of Space Science, University of Alabama Huntsville. His research work is focused on numerical modelling of the helium atom transport from the local interstellar medium (LISM) into the inner heliosphere and participates in the comparison of simulated energetic neutral helium atom fluxes with the NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) measurements. Dr. Bera received his PhD degree in Physics from the Institute for Plasma Research, India, in 2018. His thesis work is centered on fluid and particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of laser/beam-plasma interaction systems. He then joined Plasma Dynamics Computational Lab at the Dept. of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering, Virginia Tech. As a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Virginia Tech, he carried out theoretical and computational research on Rayleigh-Taylor instability induced mixing and their turbulence in magnetized high energy density (HED) plasmas.

Curriculum Vitae

Education

• Ph.D. in Physics. Institute for Plasma Research (IPR), Gujarat, India. Duration: 2012–2018. Dissertation title: "Fluid simulation of electron beam driven wakefield in a cold plasma"
• Master of Science (M.Sc.) in Physics. Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India. Duration: 2010–2012
• Bachelor of Science(B.Sc.) in Physics. University of Calcutta, West Bengal, India. Duration: 2007–2010

Honors & Awards

• "PSSI Poster Award" by PSSI conference, SINP, Kolkata, India, December 2015.
• "PSSI Poster Award" by PSSI conference, Kerala, India, December 2014.

Recent Publications

• "Boundary driven unconventional mechanism of macroscopic magnetic field generation in beam-plasma interaction", Amita Das, Atul Kumar, Chandrasekhar Shukla, Ratan Kumar Bera, Deepa Verma, Devshree Mandal, Ayushi Vashishta, Bhavesh Patel, Y. Hayashi, K. A. Tanaka, G. Chatterjee, Amit D. Lad, G. Ravindra Kumar, and Predhiman Kaw, Phys. Rev. Research, 2, 033405 (2020)

• "Nonlinear propagation of low-frequency electromagnetic disturbances in plasmas", Sharad Kumar Yadav, Ratan Kumar Bera, Deepa Verma, Predhiman Kaw, and Amita Das, Contributions to Plasma Physics e202000101(2020)

• "Effect of transverse beam size on the wakefields and driver beam dynamics in plasma wakefield acceleration schemes", Ratan Kumar Bera, Devshree Mandal, Amita Das, and Sudip Sengupta, AIP Advances 10, 025203 (2020)