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.
