Professor Ben Owen, Department of Physics & Astronomy, Texas Tech University
Multi-messenger Astrophysics from LIGO to Cosmic Explorer

LIGO’s detections of gravitational waves from binary mergers made history and yielded insights into extreme gravity and matter. With more detections, unusual mergers will yield ever more information on new populations. What other gravitational wave signals will be detected, from LIGO to Cosmic Explorer? What physics and astrophysics will we learn from them, especially in tandem with new and planned electromagnetic astronomy facilities?

Dr. Horia Petrach, Department of Physics, Indiana & Purdue Universities

Interactions of Neuromodulators with Model Lipid Membranes

Neurotransmitters and neuromodulators typically function by binding to specialized receptors in neuronal membranes. In this work, we study two different neurotransmitters that also function as neuromodulators, namely dopamine (DA) and adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Dopamine is best known as the feel-pleasure hormone while ATP is best known for being the source of energy in the cell.

The Impact of Electron Physics in High Energy Density Plasmas

The study of high energy density plasmas (HEDP) allows researchers to study the impact of microscopic phenomena on macroscopic scales by using plasmas dense enough to be probed by high energy photons (i.e. visible, UV, X-ray). This probe allows us to use readily available detectors to make precise, two-dimensional measurements of the electron density and infer the electron flow speed and magnetic field.