Research News — Department of Physics — UPC. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

Marc Melgosa is defending his thesis on air traffic flow and capacity management

Marc Melgosa defended his thesis co-supervised by Dr. Xavier Prats and Dr. Andrija Vidosavljevic on March 22, 2023 at the Baix Llobregat Campus. Entitled "Enhanced Air Traffic Flow and Capacity Management under Trajectory Based Operations considering traffic Complexity", the thesis presents a new operational concept that integrates demand and capacity management in the same optimization problem, uses complexity metrics (in instead of the number of arrivals) to measure traffic and takes into account airspace user preferences allowing the possibility of using alternative trajectories to avoid airspace congestion

Discovery of a neutron star that behaves like a black hole

An international scientific team, in which Yuri Cavecchi, from the physics department of the UPC has participated, and led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has found a neutron star that steals matter from a companion star in a violent and unstable. This process, previously only observed in black holes. The study is published in the journal Nature.

Are dislocations in solid helium “supersolid”?

A team of researchers from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain), Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Brazil) and Stanford University (USA) performed advanced quantum atomistic simulations to assess the Bose-Einstein condensate fraction of solid helium at zero temperature containing dislocations, a defective system that previously had been proposed to be “supersolid”

Created a method to prevent and detect forest desertification

Giulio Tirabassi and Cristina Masoller have created an algorithm based on the analysis of satellite data provided by NASA's MODIS instrument that allows preventing the definitive destruction of natural environments

Unmasking the microscopic fingerprint in finite-temperature features of a one-dimensional Bose gas

A team of researchers from UPC in Barcelona and EPFL in Lausanne built a new theory to explain the finite-temperature properties in terms of microscopic excitations of bosons in one dimension

Participation of the Physics department in research using the WEAVE spectrograph on the evolution of galaxies

A few hundred astronomy professionals have designed and planned a total of five years of operations for the WEAVE spectrograph, a powerful instrument recently installed at the Canary Islands Observatory.

A new experimental and numerical investigation on the fatigue response of composite and metal aircraft structures

The researchers Siddharth Pitta, Jose I. Rojas, Francesc Roure, Daniel Crespo, and Magd Abdel Wahab, from the Group of Materials Characterization of the UPC, the Materials Strength Laboratory of the UPC, and the Ghent University, have made new progresses in the characterization of the fatigue response of aircraft repair patches made of carbon fiber reinforced epoxy (CFRE) and aluminum alloy on aircraft airframe substrates made as well of CFRE and aluminum alloy