Torsional Alfvén waves are promising candidates for transporting energy from the solar surface into the corona and have been theoretically predicted for decades. However, their detection is notoriously difficult and so far has mostly relied on indirect signatures.

Imaging and spectral data from the space-based IRIS observatory has been used to study a surge of cool solar plasma in the corona above the East limb of the Sun. The surge has been triggered by the magnetic reconnection of open and closed magnetic fields. Using imaging and spectral information the tell-tale torsional signatures of plasma rotation of alternating sense have been revealed.

This discovery was made by scientists from the University of Warwick's Physics Department and the University of Oslo's Rosseland Centre for Solar Physics and has been published this month as a letter in the journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics. This study provides the first direct observational evidence that magnetic reconnection leads to the generation of large-scale torsional Alfvén waves in the solar corona.

Petra Kohutova, Erwin Verwichte, and Clara Froment 2020, A&A, 633, L6

Marin Alexe of the Functional Electronic Materials group has received a prestigious Humboldt Research Award, recognising the breadth and depth of his research career in Condensed Matter Physics. Marin will work with academics in Germany to undertake research projects at the Martin Luther University, Halle/Saale and Technical University, Darmstadt.

Further information can be found at http://www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/programmes-by-target-group.html

On 10 December the European Research Council (ERC) announced the recipients of its latest Consolidator Grant competition: 301 top scientists and scholars across Europe. Funding for these researchers, part of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, is worth in total €600 million. With this support, the new grantees will have a chance to build up their teams and have far-reaching impact.

Dr Mika Vesterinen from the Elementary Particle Physics group has been awarded over €1.8 million for a project to advance our knowledge of the fundamental physical forces of nature, using one of the particle detectors at the CERN facility. He said: “The Standard Model makes several precise predictions that are yet to be matched by experimental measurements of the same precision. The ERC funding allows me to build a team of experts that will confront this problem with innovative high-precision analyses of data from the LHCb experiment at CERN.

“A significant disagreement between our measurements and the predictions would indicate new physics beyond the Standard Model, which is the holy grail of particle physics.”