Research News

A study led by UPC/IEEC has determined for the first time the mass and radius of one of the oldest stars in our Galaxy, allowing to validate the theoretical relationship between the mass and radius for this class of stars. Alberto Rebassa, a physics professor from our department in the group Astronomy and Astrophysics, has led the study.

M. Carmen Casas, Raúl Rodríguez and Alba Llabrés collaborate with the Meteorological Service of Catalonia and the UB to evaluate the quality of rainfall data since 1855, long before standardized measurements were taken at modern meteorological stations. The reliability of these data is key to understanding the effects of climate change in Catalonia.

The computational research, lead by Arnau Miró, professor in the Aerospace Engineering Division of the Physics Department and a member of the TUAREG research group, has been published in the International Journal of Thermal Sciences in collaboration with the CASE department in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. As Arnau Miró says, he is focused on understanding “how to cool future stuff using Synthetic Jets” with a special focus on synthetic jet actuators.

The work of Laureano Ramírez-Piscina in Physical Review E on the Langevin formalism of diffusion in channels last July has been selected by the editor as one of the main contributions to statistical physics in the journal.

The undergraduate project done by Martí Perpinyà in Physical Engineering, under the direction of Alberto Rebassa and Jordi José, has discovered the first system of three white dwarfs. The UPC news picks up the report hoping it will reach a general audience

Ramon y Cajal researcher in the Physics department Sergio Alonso publishes, in collaboration with Brazilian Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora and the Deutsches Herzzentrum Berlin, a novel simulation method to understand how the hearts can beat anomalously with a signal originating from the same heart (ectopic beat) instead of our natural external pacemaker.

A team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the United States, the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) and the UPC uses experiments with ultra-cold atoms, trapped and driven by lasers, to create a new topological insulator induced by the disorder.