The PhD defence and trial lecture will be streamed. The chair of the defence will moderate the disputation.
Ex auditorio questions: the chair of the defence will invite the audience physically present in the auditorium to ask ex auditorio questions.
→ Live streaming of trial lecture and disputation: zoom webinar
→ Request for thesis copy (available until the disputation starts)
Trial lecture
Time and place: August 31, 2026 - 10:15 AM
Kelvin (V316) -Fysikkbygningen
Title: "Predicting Space Weather"
Main research findings
The majority of space is made up of a sea of plasma, with island of solid matter such as planets, moons, dust, spacecraft or even astronauts. Immersing any solid object in plasma results in electric charging of the object, as well as significant disturbances to the surrounding plasma. Understanding the plasma-object interaction is crucial for many situations, including reliable operation of scientific instrumentation on sounding rockets and satellites.
This thesis has developed a complementary set of numerical codes to simulate and study the plasma-object interaction. These codes were used to simulate sounding rockets, probes and daughter-payloads in the ionosphere, as well as the lunar surface and ensembles of dust particles, allowing us to study the plasma-object interaction from different perspectives.
We uncover a new trapping mechanism for ions in magnetized plasma interacting with an object using a new analytical approach and validate the daughter-payload instrumentation on the ICI-5b sounding rocket mission. Simulations of dusty plasmas show that its spatial and temporal evolution and resulting dust structure is sensitive to small charge changes.
Our studies provide new insights to the complex dynamics of objects in plasma, both for specific applications and for the fundamental understanding of objects in plasma.
Adjudication Committee
- Dr. Jan Deca, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), University of Colorado, Boulder, USA
- Associate Professor Audun Theodorsen, Department of Physics and Technology, The Artctic University of Norway (UiT), Norway
- Associate Professor Judith Reindl, Department of Physics, University of Oslo (UiO), Norway
Supervisors
- Professor Wojciech Miloch, Department of Physics, University of Oslo, Norway
- Dr. Rinku Mishra, Department of Physics, University of Oslo, Norway
Chair of defence
Professor Ørjan Grøttem Martinsen, Department of Physics, University of Oslo, Norway
Candidate contact information
LinkedIn: Gaute A. Holen
Email: gaute.ah@gmail.com
Contact information to Department: Line Trosterud Resvold