Senate Faculty

Lu_Wenbin_portrait

Wenbin Lu

Assistant Professor

Contact:
E:wenbinlu@berkeley.edu

Website and  Publications

Research Areas

Wenbin is interested in high-energy transient phenomena — the sources that suddenly show up luminously on the sky and then quickly fade away — including fast radio bursts, tidal disruption events, gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, compact object mergers. These sources are the Universe’s most extreme physics labs where violent interactions occur in an environment of high energy density, large spacetime curvature, and/or strong magnetic fields. The goal is to theoretically understand the underlying mechanisms that control the multi-wavelength/messenger behaviors of these spectacular events. Wenbin’s studies involve plasma physics, general/special relativity, hydrodynamics, radiative transfer, (binary) stellar evolution, accretion disk, and tidal interactions.

Biography

Lu received a PhD degree in Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Before joining UC Berkeley, he was a Burke Fellow at Caltech (2018-2021) and then a Spitzer Fellow at Princeton University (2021-2022). He graduated from Peking University (in Beijing) in 2013 with AB in Physics.