Yajie Yuan, an assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, was selected for the Simons Collaboration on Extreme Electrodynamics of Compact Sources.
Yuan is one of four co-investigators focused on the extreme physics of neutron stars as part of a large collaboration directed by Roger Blandford at Stanford University. She will lead a study of plasmas in neutron star magnetospheres, the regions outside of neutron stars that are dominated by the stars’ magnetic fields. Her team is investigating how these plasmas respond to electrodynamic processes operating on both microscopic and macroscopic scales.
“Currently we are in a particularly good position to unveil many of the mysteries of black holes and neutron stars,” said Yuan, who is a faculty fellow of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences. “We have unprecedented multi-wavelength and multi-messenger coverage, which keeps bringing us new discoveries that reveal the extreme plasma environment around black holes and neutron stars. Meanwhile, advances in numerical techniques allow us to complete ab-initio simulations of the underlying physical processes.”
Yuan joined Washington University in 2022, after completing a postdoctoral research fellowship at Princeton University and a research fellowship with the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute.
