The Air Force Young Investigator Research Program (YIP) supports individual early-in-career scientists and engineers showing exceptional ability and promise for conducting basic research. The program’s objective is to foster creative basic research in science and engineering; enhance early career development of outstanding young investigators; and increase opportunities for the young investigator to recognize the Air Force and Space Force mission and related challenges in science and engineering.
YIP awards are funded up to $150,000 per year for three years, for a total of $450,000.
Congratulations Ben!
Additional award details can be found here.
The prevalence of non-thermal, highly energetic particles is one of the most striking features of the universe. Such particles are responsible for some of the most spectacular events in space physics and astrophysics. For instance, these particles are the engines behind the most luminous events in the universe, including Gamma-Ray Bursts and Blazars. They are components of solar flares and coronal mass ejections – outflows of energetic plasma that can damage satellites and disrupt power grids. In laboratory fusion devices, high-energy “runaway electrons” and alpha particles behave like non-thermal populations. Controlling them is vital for achieving fusion energy.
Understanding these particles is a frontier problem in plasma physics and astrophysics. For many decades, scientists have been trying to understand what causes these particles to have so much energy and why they defy the “Maxwell-Boltzmann equilibrium”.
In a recent publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers at UW Madison and Los Alamos National Laboratory proposed yet another view on this age-old problem. They analyzed the fact that non-thermal particles often appear in turbulent environments, that is, in systems where the flow of hot ionized gas – plasma – is random. Turbulence, on the other hand, whether it appears in the interstellar medium, Earth’s atmosphere, or a stirred cup of coffee is a rather universal phenomenon. It generates fluid fluctuations, known as “swirling eddies”, whose scales and energies have remarkably universal distributions.
Physicists have long been intrigued by universal laws, which they expect to emerge from theories that explain fundamental physical behavior. These theories can be applied to a variety of systems and environments, often extending well beyond the cases they were first developed for.
In this study, researchers investigated whether the universality observed in the energy distribution of energetic particles is related to the universality of turbulent fluctuations. They focused on the balance of energy between turbulent fluctuations and particles whose gyro-scales (the sizes of their rotational orbits in a magnetic field) are comparable to the scales of these fluctuations. “This energy balance assumption allowed us to analytically predict the particle energy distribution functions,” says Stanislav Boldyrev, one of the study’s authors, “and our predictions aligned with the results of numerical simulations. We may be one step closer to solving the mystery of non-equilibrium particles in space and astrophysical systems.”
He notes, however, that the hypothesis requires further investigation, which may involve both observational and numerical studies. “This study inspires young researchers by highlighting fundamental unsolved problems in plasma dynamics,” continues Boldyrev, “It would not have been possible without the years of hard work by our talented young scientists, which include graduate student Daniel Humphrey and postdoctoral researcher Dr. Cristian Vega, as well as the support from the Department of Energy and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.”
The figure above shows the electron density in turbulent electron-positron pair plasma.
For more information read the published article.
This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Fusion Energy Sciences under award number DE-SC0024362, and by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
Two recent publications led by UW-Madison astrophysicists were featured in a July 9 New York Times article on planetary engulfment, the process by which a star consumes an orbiting companion. Both center on TOI-5882, an evolved subgiant star hosting a massive brown dwarf (22 Jupiter masses) on a tight, 7-day orbit, and together they reconstruct both the chemical fingerprint and the physical fate of that doomed companion.
The first paper (Kotten et al. 2026) shows that TOI-5882 carries an unusually strong lithium signature, best explained by the star having engulfed a super-Earth to Neptune-mass planet. The second (Narayan et al. 2026) develops a new, self-consistent framework for how tides drain orbital energy and angular momentum from the companion, demonstrating that internal gravity waves accelerate the brown dwarf’s inspiral far faster than classical models predict.
The work was led by two former UW-Madison undergraduates: Brooke Kotten, a former astronomy and physics major who is now an NSF Graduate Research Fellow at the University of Michigan, and Ritvik Sai Narayan, an astronomy major now heading to MIT this fall. Both students were mentored by Professor Soares-Furtado (Depts of Physics and Astronomy), who directed Brooke’s project and co-mentored Ritvik’s alongside Professor Rich Townsend. Townsend (Dept of Astronomy), who holds a Physics affiliation, played a key role in developing the computational model the team built to understand the fate of the brown dwarf. That two undergraduates drove research at this level speaks to the mentorship and research opportunities UW-Madison offers.
This project is closely aligned with the goals of WiCOR (Wisconsin Center for Origins Research; Physics and Astronomy are both department members). When a star consumes a planet, traces of the planet’s chemical makeup are left behind in the stellar atmosphere, allowing us to reconstruct its bulk composition. This matters for the search for life because a planet’s ability to support life depends largely on its interior chemistry. That chemistry determines whether the planet can form a rocky surface, maintain a protective magnetic field, and create an atmosphere. That interior chemistry is normally hidden beneath clouds and surface layers. Engulfment is one of the only ways to probe far beneath a planet’s atmosphere and determine the bulk composition of its interior. Stars like TOI-5882 provide a rare window into the ingredients that determine whether worlds like these could ever support life.
The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory has begun the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST); an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of our Universe that will revolutionize the way we explore the cosmos.
University of Wisconsin–Madison physics professor Keith Bechtol has been part of the international team that built and operates Rubin Observatory since 2016, serving in multiple leadership roles. He served as System Verification and Validation Scientist responsible for orchestrating the on-sky observing campaigns and data analyses to confirm that the as-built Rubin Observatory can achieve its ambitious science goals. In October 2025, Bechtol was appointed to lead the Early Operations Optimization campaign, coordinating efforts to tune up the observatory to reliably perform at the high level needed for 10 years of sustained LSST observing.
“Starting tonight, Rubin Observatory will repeatedly scan the sky on nearly every clear night for the next decade. We aim to acquire more than 2 million individual images using the largest camera ever built and produce the greatest cosmic movie ever made,” Bechtol says. “Delivering consistently sharp image quality across the enormous field of view throughout the night, night-after-night, while rapidly scanning the sky requires many components working together with incredible precision.”
Bechtol is also Deputy Spokesperson for the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration, the international science collaboration formed to perform cosmological analyses of LSST data. “We are all looking forward to seeing what we can learn about dark matter and dark energy from LSST data. The discovery potential is enormous and there could be surprises.”
UW–Madison PhD students Miranda Gorsuch, Julian Beas-Gonzalez, and Kayleigh Excell have also been contributing to the scientific validation of early data from Rubin Observatory.
For more information, read the official release here.
Read the full article at:
https://cms.cern/news/search-new-particles-higgs-boson