Astrophysical Dynamo Project supported by the ERC

The European Research Council has decided to fund a concentrated 5-year effort at Nordita in Stockholm to improve our understanding of astrophysical dynamos. This work couples large-scale numerical simulations with numerically guided analytical approaches. An ultimate goal is to have a physically consistent model of the solar dynamo.

Simulations, on the one hand, still lack some potentially important properties (tachocline, near-surface shear layer, ability to shed small-scale magnetic helicity), while analytic approaches (including mean-field theory) are still being developed to explain and reproduce more successfully some of the systematic behaviors seen in simulations.

One of the default research tool is the Pencil Code, which is a public domain code initiated at Nordita and used for solving partial differential equations on massively parallel computers. Its maintenance through a remote versioning system (SVN) allows the users easy updates and the possibility of sharing new and/or experimental developments with other users.

Current project members:

PI: Axel Brandenburg, his research highlights and publications


Nordita Astrophysics Group in April 2010. From the left: Dhrubaditya Mitra, Emeric Bron, Simon Candelaresi, Koen Kemel, Fabio Del Sordo, Jörn Warnecke, Niccoló Bucciantini, Piyali Chatterjee, Matthias Rheinhardt, Axel Brandenburg, Gustavo Guerrero, Alexander Hubbard.

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