Keele UniversityFaculty of Natural Sciences
Physics & Astrophysics
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1.4 million Euro ERC starting grant for Keele Academic
Dr Raphael Hirschi, Astrophysics group, iEPSAM, has secured a prestigious 1.4 million Euro starting grant from the European Research Council (ERC) - the first awarded to a Keele academic. This builds on his European funding profile as scientist in charge for a Marie Curie IIF and associate partner for the EUROCORE Eurogenesis programme.The ERC starting grant will fund a 5-year multi-disciplinary project entitled SHYNE (Stellar HYdrodynamics, Nucleosynthesis and Evolution), which starts this month. The grant will enable Dr Hirschi to build a team of two post-doctoral researchers and two PhD students, all based at Keele, and to acquire a dedicated computer cluster comprising 1000+ CPU cores. The computer cluster will have 288 cores virtually sharing memory through the innovative hardware developed by the Norwegian company Numascale. The SHYNE team will collaborate with Numascale in order to determine the best balance between shared and distributed memory architectures, adding an inter-sectoral component to the project.
The SHYNE project will develop an innovative software suite that draws upon numerical techniques from several disciplines, with the goal of extending them in their application to produce state of the art theoretical models of stars. This software suite will produce comprehensive datasets of stellar evolution models that will provide a theoretical framework of analysis for astronomical observing facilities (ESO VLT, E-ELT & ESA GAIA). This project will also use stellar models as a virtual nuclear physics laboratory to guide and boost the return on investments in large nuclear physics experiments (e.g. FAIR at GSI, D).
This project will tackle many challenging questions and unsolved problems: How are the elements we are made of created? What are the properties of the most massive stars and what is their fate? Do electron-capture supernovae exist? What are the most important nuclear reaction rates and what precision in nuclear physics experiments is desirable for astrophysics applications? How does one improve 1-dimensional models using modern computers and multi-dimensional simulations? What is the best computer platform for medium- and large-scale simulations? The SHYNE project will thus have a wide ranging impact on the various disciplines involved and also build a promising bridge with a high-tech company.
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