Events

Dr. Katie Mack, Physics at the End of the Universe

The Big Bang theory tells the story of the beginning of the Universe, our cosmic home for the last 13.8 billion years. But how does the story end? I’ll share what modern astrophysics tells us about the ultimate fate of the cosmos, and what the catastrophic destruction of all reality would look like to anyone still around to see it.

Astronomy At Home Lecture Series: Perseid Meteor Shower

Hello everyone!!

To our new students, welcome to Physics at UWaterloo! To those returning, welcome back!

We are the PHYS10 Committee, a group of student volunteers and supervising professors who want to do our part in connecting you to the physics community around you through a weekly seminar series full of panels, guest speakers, and more!

Yun Wang has led Galaxy Clustering science on the Roman Space Telescope, and is the deputy lead for Euclid Galaxy Clustering SWG. She is the PI for the proposed NASA space mission concepts, ISCEA (Infrared Satellite for Cosmic Evolution Astrophysics) and ATLAS (Astrophysics Telescope for Large Area Spectroscopy). She is a Senior Research Scientist at IPAC at California Institute of Technology.

Mohamad Shalaby is a senior postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz institute for astrophysics Potsdam (Germany).  His research focuses on studying acceleration, transport and non-thermal radiation processes from plasmas that permeate our visible universe, i.e., from stellar to intergalactic environments and thus their implied complex feedback on various observables. Mohamad attended AIMS (South Africa) and PSI programs before finishing his PhD under the supervision of Avery Broderick in 2017 at University of Waterloo and perimeter institute for theoretical physics.

Talk Title and Abstract

The mechanism of efficient electron acceleration at parallel non-relativistic electron-ion shocks

Cosmic-ray-driven instabilities play a crucial role during particle acceleration at shocks and during the propagation of the accelerated cosmic rays (CR) in galaxies and galaxy clusters. The instabilities amplify magnetic fields and modulate CR transport so that the intrinsically collisionless CR population is coupled to the thermal plasma and provides important dynamical feedback. In this talk, I will discuss a new CR driven instability we recently found (called intermediate-scale instability; Shalaby et al. 2021 [ApJ 908 206]). The new instability excites comoving ion-cyclotron electromagnetic waves at sub-ion skin-depth scale, and operates when the ratio of drift speed with respect to the ion Alfvénic speed is less than sqrt(mi/me)/2, where mi (me) is the ion (electron) mass. Its linear growth rate is typically about 10-20 times faster in comparison to that at the ion gyro-scale making it a crucial player in both acceleration and transport of charged particles in galactic and stellar environments. After a brief discussion of various potential implications of the new instability, I will discuss how we showed using Particle-in-cell simulations that the new instability provides the only known mechanism to date for efficient electron acceleration at parallel electron-ion shocks, and thus solving the long-standing electron-injection problem at these shocks (Shalaby et al. 2022 [ApJ 932 86]). This suggested that common practice of performing plasma simulations with a reduced ion-to-electron mass ratio (where the intermediate instability is suppressed) not only artificially precludes electron acceleration but also results in erroneous electron and ion heating in the downstream and shock transition regions.

Scarlata received her PhD from Padova University, in 2004. After holding postdoctoral positions at ETH-Zurich (CH) and Caltech, in 2011 she moved to the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where she is currently a Distinguished McKnight professor. Her research focus on problems related to the formation and evolution of galaxies.

Felipe Andrade-Oliveira is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan. His research is focused on the investigation of the Large Scale Structure and the Dark Energy nature through Cosmological Surveys. He works as a Pipeline Scientist for Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) where he is also the co-leader of the covariance topic team.

Liza Sazonova is a an incoming postdoctoral fellow at uWaterloo, working on structural evolution of galaxies using the upcoming Rubin LSST survey. She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University, where she worked as part of the SPOGs collaboration on trying to understand the life and death of post-starburst galaxies.  

Talk title and abstract

TBD

Stefano Camera is an Associate Professor at the University of Turin (Italy), where he returned after having been postdoc and research fellow at the High Technical Institute of the University of Lisbon (Portugal) and at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics of The University of Manchester (UK).  His research spans various areas of cosmology with surveys of the large-scale structure of the Universe, with a definite predilection for innova

Mohaddesseh Azimlu completed her PhD dissertation on studying star-forming regions at University of Waterloo in 2009. Then continued her research on star formation in other galaxies at Western University in London, Ontario and later joined Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in 2011. She left academia and joined Ontario Public Services in 2015, but continued outreach activities in science and astronomy since then.