Found 12 talks width keyword numerical simulations

In this talk, I will start by briefly presenting the Institut d'Optique Graduate School and the Laboratoire Charles Fabry, where I conduct my research. Then I will explain the principle of adaptive optics and discuss some issues related to the control of AO systems. This will lead to the general ideas behind high-performance control. In particular, I will explain why high-performance control can outperform the standard integrator. Some results of on-sky experiments will be shown, and I will conclude the talk by presenting our PhD students working through research collaborations.

By providing information on distances and proper motions for one billion stars, the Gaia satellite allows us to investigate the major unsolved challenges in galaxy formation: the nature of dark matter, the origin of Galactic spiral activity and its relation to the bar, and more generally the history of the Milky Way. 
My research aims to develop a theoretical approach to modeling and exploiting the big data and address problems at the forefront of Galactic Dynamics at various scales. What is the origin of the spiral activity in the Milky Way? How are all of these perturbations to the structure of the Galaxy coupled to each other directly and through the dark-matter halo?  I will also present my ongoing work on statistical techniques of big-data analysis and advanced numerical simulations used to interpret the evolution of star clusters and discover streams in the stellar disk of the Milky Way.

The realism of hydrodynamical simulations of the formation and evolution of galaxies has improved considerably in recent years. I will try to give some insight into the reasons behind this success, focusing in particular on the importance of subgrid models and the associated limitations. I will also present recent results from the cosmological EAGLE simulations as well as from higher-resolution simulations of individual galaxies.

Cold gas streaming along the dark-matter filaments of the cosmic web is predicted to be the major provider of resources for disc buildup and star formation in massive galaxies in the early universe. We use hydrodynamical simulations to study to what extent these cold streams are traceable in the extended circum-galactic environment of galaxies via Ly alpha emission, Ly alpha absorption and selected low ionisation metal absorption lines. We predict the strength of the absorption signal produced by the streams and find that it is consistent with observations in high redshift galaxies. The characteristics of the Ly alpha emission of our simulated galaxies are similar in luminosity, morphology and extent to the observed Ly alpha blobs, with distinct kinematic features. We analyse the characteristics of the cold streams in simulations and present scaling relations for the amount of infall, its velocity, distribution and its clumpiness and compare our findings with observations.

I will present an evolutionary model for the origin of Andromeda II, a dSph satellite of M31, involving a merger between two disky dwarf galaxies than explains the origin of prolate rotation recently detected in the kinematic data for And II. The simulation traces the evolution of two dwarfs, whose structural parameters differ only in their disk scale lengths, placed on a radial orbit towards each other with their angular momenta inclined by 90 deg. After 5 Gyr the merger remnant forms a stable triaxial galaxy with rotation only around the longest axis. This prolate rotation is naturally explained as due to the symmetry of the initial configuration which leads to the conservation of angular momentum components along the direction of the merger. The stars originating from the two dwarfs show significantly different surface density profiles while having very similar kinematics in agreement with the properties of separate stellar populations in And II. I will also discuss an alternative scenario for the formation of And II, via tidal stirring of a disky dwarf galaxy. While intrinsic rotation occurs naturally in this model as a remnant of the initial rotation of the disk, it is mostly around the shortest axis of the stellar component. The rotation around the longest axis is induced only occasionally and remains much smaller that the system's velocity dispersion. I conclude that although tidal origin of the velocity distribution in And II cannot be excluded, it is much more naturally explained within the scenario involving a past merger event. Thus, in principle, the presence of prolate rotation in dSph galaxies of the Local Group and beyond may be used as an indicator of major mergers in their history or even as a way to distinguish between the two scenarios of their formation.

The first galaxies are thought to have started the reionization of the Universe, that is the transformation of the cosmic hydrogen from its initial neutral to its present ionized state that occurred during the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang. I will review the key physics of reionization by the first galaxies and highlight the computational challenges of simulating the relevant processes, primarily the transport of ionizing photons. I will introduce the radiative transfer method TRAPHIC that we have developed to address these challenges. I will discuss the application of TRAPHIC in zoomed cosmological simulations of the first galaxies and evaluate the prospects for observing these galaxies with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. I will conclude by presenting first results from Aurora, a new suite of simulations to investigate reionization and galaxy formation across a large range of scales.

With the advent of GPU accelerators the landscape of High Performance Computing has started to change rapidly. While this is in principle good news, the increased compute power comes with a steep price tag in that new languages (CUDA, OpenCL) must be used. Recently Intel has announced their own coprocessor Many Integrated Cores (MIC) technology which will deliver competitive performance but will be programmed through familiar languages (Fortran, C/C++ and OpenMP). In my talk I will introduce Intel's MIC architecture and will discuss the ongoing efforts at the Texas Advanced Computing Center to build a 10 PetaFlop cluster with MIC coprocessors in early 2013. Coprocessors (MIC) and accelerators (GPU) are here to stay and the changing hardware will spur considerable changes in general software design. Astrophysics codes of all varieties (for example highly parallel simulations, data-intensive software pipelines for large surveys, and even data reduction software on desktops) will have to adapt to the new environment. I will discuss software design, performance considerations, and optimizations in general and specifically with respect to the MIC technology. In the second part of my talk I will introduce the software package ASSET (Advanced Spectral Synthesis 3D Tool) that allows for the fast and efficient calculation of spectra from 3D hydrodynamical models and will highlight recent projects that have employed high-resolution (> 1,000,000), wide-range (1000's of Angstroem) synthetic spectra derived from 3D radiation transfer.

Massive stars lose mass through powerful, radiatively driven stellar winds. Building on the original "CAK" model for steady, spherical winds driven by line-scattering, this talk will review recent research on the multi-faceted nature of such wind mass loss under varied conditions, for example due to rapid rotation, magnetic channeling, binary interaction, or a luminosity near the Eddington limit. An overall theme is that wind mass loss can in this way lead to a wide variety of astrophysical phenomena, including bipolar nebulae, massive star magnetospheres, colliding winds or compact companion accretion, and luminous blue variable eruption. The discussion here will summarize these with an emphasis on their varied observational signatures.

Long Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) are the most dramatic examples of massive stellar deaths, usually associated with supernovae (Woosley et al. 2006). They release ultra-relativistic jets producing non-thermal emission through synchrotron radiation as they interact with the surrounding medium (Zhang et al. 2004). Here we report observations of the peculiar GRB 101225A (the "Christmas burst"). Its gamma-ray emission was exceptionally long and followed by a bright X-ray transient with a hot thermal component and an unusual optical counterpart. During the first 10 days, the optical emission evolved as an expanding, cooling blackbody after which an additional component, consistent with a faint supernova, emerged. We determine its distance to 1.6 Gpc by fitting the spectral-energy distribution and light curve of the optical emission with a GRB-supernova template. Deep optical observations may have revealed a faint, unresolved host galaxy. Our proposed progenitor is a helium star-neutron star merger that underwent a common envelope phase expelling its hydrogen envelope. The resulting explosion created a GRB-like jet which gets thermalized by interacting with the dense, previously ejected material and thus creating the observed black-body, until finally the emission from the supernova dominated. An alternative explanation is a minor body falling onto a neutron star in the Galaxy (Campana et al. 2011).

This lecture will address recent progress in modeling the emergence of cosmic structure at high redshifts. Also new insights gained from numerical simulations into the processes relevant for star formation are presented. Rapid magnetic field growth in galaxies and the important role of proto-stellar outflows regulating star formation up to pc scales are particularly highlighted.