Montana State’s Dana Longcope wins Arctowski Medal for contributions to solar physics

Montana State University physicist Dana Longcope was awarded the National Academy of Science’s Arctowski Medal on Thursday. The medal, given every other year, is a recognition of significant contributions to the study of solar physics. Awardees are nominated by peers in the field.

“What I really love is doing the work,” Longcope said. “But to know my colleagues all around the world, all around the country find it worthwhile, it’s very humbling that they found my work to be of that caliber,” Longcope said.

Longcope, who is the head of the Department of Physics in the College of Letters and Science, conducts theoretical research into the storage and release of magnetic energy around the sun. It is same the type of energy that leads to solar flares and the solar winds that cause the northern lights.

A nomination letter from Department of Physics colleagues Charles Kankelborg, Jiong Qiu and Neil Cornish describes Longcope as a “creative and prolific physicist” whose work has had widespread impact.

“It’s bringing order to the chaos,” Cornish said. “He is able to come up with these elegant models to describe the essential physics of the sun.”

Longcope helped define the nature of the sun’s magnetism by creating a framework for the rope-like bundles of magnetic field lines known as thin flux tubes that permeate the sun. By outlining the basic structure of the system and developing fundamental equations of motion for the flux tubes, Longcope’s work explained how the tubes move and store magnetic energy around the corona, the outermost part of the sun’s atmosphere.

Kankelborg pictures this topology as a sort of wiring diagram, or “a map made out of spaghetti.”

“If you know where everything is connected and if you know whether this magnetic field wraps around that one on the way to the other pole where it’s anchored, then you know the overall configuration and it tells you something about the storage of energy,” he said.

This framework led to a three-dimensional, unified picture of a phenomenon called magnetic reconnection, wherein Longcope describes how the movement of these flux tubes — and breaking and rejoining of the magnetic fields inside — releases massive amounts of energy and predicts how energy could be released in a solar flare based on the magnetic fields on the surface.

“He brought the theory and the observations together, which is a tremendous achievement,” Kankelborg said. “Every theoretical physicist wants to not have just a pretty theory but to be able to make predictions about things you can actually measure.”

This research has research helped hone solar flare forecasting. Right now, scientists can calculate when high-energy particles from solar eruptions may reach Earth, but not their trajectory. While effects like the aurora are celebrated, these solar events may interfere with technology like wireless communication and GPS. Geomagnetic storms can also impact air travel and the electrical grid. In his former role as head of the American Academy of Sciences Solar Physics Division, Longcope briefed congressional offices on the importance of space weather.

Longcope, who has always loved puzzles, sees physics as the fundamental explanation for how the world works. Looking out the window of his office on campus, he can see the clouds moving over the Spanish Peaks and knows the various forces that control their movement. He contemplates the physics of the mundane – such as water flowing though a faucet – and keeps asking questions.

“It’s wonderful to be able to pose a question for yourself and then figure out the answer and realize you’re the first person to have ever answered that question,” Longcope said.

Longcope received his bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 1986, where he started studying the physics of plasma, a fourth state of matter where gases become so hot their atoms are torn apart. He stayed at Cornell for graduate school, receiving a doctorate in applied physics in 1993 and parlaying an interest in plasma to researching its most dramatic example: the sun’s atmosphere. Aside from the inherent drama of solar flares, Longcope said he is drawn to the counter-intuitive nature of their energy release.

“You wouldn’t think that suddenly the sun would be producing 50 million Kelvin plasmas when the surface is only 5,700 Kelvin,” he said, referring to the unit of temperature measurement used by solar physicists.

After post-doctoral research at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and the University of California, Berkeley, Longcope was recruited to MSU’s budding solar physics group by Loren Acton, who is now a professor emeritus. Longcope joined the faculty in 1996, drawn, he said, by a desire to pass on knowledge to younger scientists while conducting research amidst an esteemed group of colleagues.

Even now, a solar physics group is a rarity in American academia, Longcope said. In his time at MSU, Longcope has taught a wide variety of physics courses, from quantum and classical mechanics to mathematical physics and electricity and magnetism. He also currently co-leads NASA’s Heliophysics Summer School in Boulder, Colorado, and is helping the school go virtual for this year’s students.

“Dana is such a broad and profound physicist, but he’s motivational too,” said Qiu, who has been a member of the solar physics group since 2005. “He’s really very modest and always promoting others. I’m really impressed by that. It makes MSU such a good place.”

As a young professor and researcher, Longcope merited a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant in 1997. In 2000, it was the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), and in 2003, he earned the Karen Harvey Prize from the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical. In contrast, the Arctowski Medal honors his body of work.

The Arctowski Medal was established in 1958 to honor Polish-American meteorologist and Antarctic explorer Henryk Arctowski and recognizes “outstanding contributions to the study of solar physics and solar terrestrial relationships,” according to the National Academy of Sciences. The medal is now given every two years, along with an award of $100,000 plus a $100,000 grant to support research.

Longcope and other award winners will be honored in a virtual ceremony during the National Academy of Sciences' 158th annual meeting April 24-26. The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, and provides advice to the federal government and other organizations.