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:
Internship student:
Emeric Bron
PhD students:
Simon Candelaresi,
Fabio Del Sordo,
Koen Kemel,
Jörn Warnecke
Post-docs:
Piyali Chatterjee,
Gustavo Guerrero,
Nordita fellows:
Niccoló Bucciantini
Alexander Hubbard,
Assistant professors:
Petri Käpylä (on leave),
Dhrubaditya Mitra (acting)
Vising professor:
Matthias Rheinhardt
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.
Links:
Project pages: daily routine and progress reports
Press release of 15 Sept 2008,
ERC overall outcome
Interview with British Publishers, January 2010
How to find Nordita on Google Earth
View Larger Map
Figure at the top: courtesy of Dr Petri Käpylä
Käpylä, P. J., Korpi, M. J., & Brandenburg, A., Mitra, D.,
& Tavakol, R.: 2010, ``Convective dynamos in spherical wedge geometry,'' Astron. Nachr. 331, 73-81
(arXiv:0909.1330, PDF)
$Date: 2010-05-01 14:03:31 $, $Author: brandenb $, $Revision: 1.30 $