Jonathan S. Wurtele earned his undergraduate degrees in Physics and Mathematics, as well as a Ph.D. in Physics, from UC Berkeley. After spending a decade at MIT, he returned to UC Berkeley in 1995, where he is currently a Professor of Physics. His research spans plasma and accelerator theory, and antihydrogen physics. Prof. Wurtele is a member of the ALPHA collaboration at CERN, which synthesizes, traps, and conducts precision measurements on antihydrogen to investigate fundamental symmetries between matter and antimatter. He has been a Foreign Research Fellow at Japan’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science and spent sabbaticals at the Hebrew University and the Weizmann Institute of Science. Outside of conventional physics, he contributed to the Berkeley Earth temperature study, and during a sabbatical at NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress he worked on the science of cities. Prof. Wurtele is an APS Fellow and co-recipient of the John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research.
Research Interests
My research interests are in beam and plasma physics, trapping and measuring the spectral and gravitational properties of antihydrogen, free electron lasers, and climate change.
Current Projects
Neutral antimatter physics: I am a member of the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) collaboration, whose goal is to conduct fundamental studies of matter-antimatter asymmetry. Our experiment used antiprotons from the Antiproton Decelerator at CERN. Until our recent successes with the current ALPHA apparatus, no group had ever trapped neutral antimatter. We have (as of 2011) synthesized and trapped hundreds of antiatoms, with confinement time of anti-atoms from 0.17s to 1000s. We are currently rebuilding our apparatus; the new apparatus should be commissioned in 2014. Students and postdocs in my group focus on the beam and plasma theory and simulation related to the trapping and synthesizing of antihydrogen. Examples of this work are the development of a Vlasov simulation to model the mixing of antiprotons and positrons and analyzing frictional cooling as a method to increase antiproton flux. More recently, we have been studying the dynamics of, and envisioning new experiments with, antihydrogen.
Select Publications
E. K. Anderson, et al. (ALPHA Collaboration). Observation of the effect of gravity on the motion of antimatter. Nature 621, 716 (2023).
V.R. Munirov, L. Friedland, and J.S. Wurtele. Autoresonant excitation of space-time quasicrystals in plasma, Phys. Rev. Research 4, 023150 (2022).
M. R. Edwards, V. R. Munirov, A. Singh, N. M. Fasano, E. Kur, N. Lemos, J. M. Mikhailova, J. S. Wurtele, and P. Michel. Holographic Plasma Lenses. Phys. Rev. Lett. 128, 065003 (2022).
G. Dobler, F.B. Bianco, M.S. Sharma, A. Karpf, J. Baur, M. Ghandehari, J.S.Wurtele andS. Koonin, The Urban Observatory: A Multi-Modal Imaging Platform for the Study of Dynamics in Complex Urban Systems. Remote Sensing 13, 1426 (2021).
C.J. Baker, et al. (ALPHA collaboration). Laser cooling of antihydrogen atoms. Nature 592, 7852 (2021).
E. Kur, F. Robicheaux, Z.T. Schroeder, A. Guerra IV, J. Fajans, E.D. Hunter, J.S. Wurtele, N. Evetts, and W.N. Hardy. Calculations and Theoretical Aspects of Magnetized Plasmas Cooled by Resonant Interaction with a Microwave Cavity. Phys. Plasmas 27, 082120 (2020).
T. Bowen, E. Zhivun, A. Wickenbrock, V. Dumont, S.D. Bale, C. Pankow, G. Dobler, J.S. Wurtele, and D. Budker. A Network of Magnetometers for Multi-Scale Urban Science and Informatics. Geosci. Instrum. Method. Data Syst. Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/gi-2018-36 (2018).
M. Ahmadi, et al. (ALPHA collaboration). Enhanced Control and Reproducibility of Non-Neutral Plasmas. Phys. Rev. Lett., 120, 025002 (2018).
M. Ahmadi, et al. (ALPHA collaboration). Investigation of the fine structure of antihydrogen. Nature 578, 375 (2020).
L. Friedland, G. Marcus, P. Michel and J.S. Wurtele. Excitation and Control of Large Amplitude Ion Acoustic Waves. Phys. Plasmas 26, 092109 (2019).
E.D. Hunter, A. Christensen, J. Fajans, T. Freisen, E. Kur, and J.S. Wurtele. Electron Cyclotron Resonance Magnetometry with a Plasma Reservoir. Phys. Plasmas 27, 032106 (2020).
A complete list of publications can be found on Google Scholar