SPEARHEAD Course on High Energy Particles in the Heliosphere
In May 2025, we organized a 5-credit graduate-level course at the University of Turku (UTU), delivered in a hybrid format to facilitate remote participation from students across European universities.
The course provided a comprehensive introduction to Very High Particles in the Heliosphere. Lecture topics spanned the theory of particle acceleration and transport, numerical modeling, observational techniques for energetic particles (both space-borne and ground-based), the phenomenology of very high energy Solar Energetic Particle (SEP) events, Forbush decreases, and assessments of their potential impact.
The course was conducted over an intensive four-week period, with classes held two days per week for seven hours each day (both in-person and via Zoom). Each day combined lectures with hands-on exercises using Python-based tools developed in specifically for the course and in SPEARHEAD project.
The teaching team included researchers from UTU as well as from all partner institutes involved in the SPEARHEAD project, offering students access to leading expertise in the field of very high energy SEPs, Forbush decreases, and related phenomena.
Programme
The course programme is given below:
Course material
The lecture slides and the exercise notebooks can be downloaded from below:
Lecture slides: all slides of the lectures can be downloaded from
https://seafile.utu.fi/d/5e81d81af9db43a58b91/?p=%2FHigh-Energy%20Particles%20in%20the%20Heliosphere&mode=list
Hands-on exercises: The Jupyter Notebooks containing the hands-on exercises can be downloaded from SPEARHEAD’s GitHub and further run via SPEARHEAD’s jupyterhub by accessing the following links. Note that for the latter a login with an existing GitHub account is needed.