Master student project suggestions

Astrophysics projects

Jesús Zavala Franco, Associate Professor

Research interests: dark matter physics, cosmological structure formation (theory and numerical simulations), galaxy formation and evolution

  • Phase space clustering of stars in dwarf galaxies. Analysing the stellar kinematics of the smallest (dwarf) galaxies in the Universe is one of the most promising avenues to elucidate the nature of dark matter. By being embedded in a dominant dark matter halo, stars in dwarf galaxies act as kinematic tracers of the hidden dark matter distribution and could potentially help us distinguish among the predictions offered by distinct dark matter models. In this project, the student will use a novel 2-point statistics in phase space (based on Zavala and Afshordi 2016) to analyse the clustering of stars in nearby dwarf galaxies and confront these observations with mock “galaxies” generated from controlled numerical simulations.
  • Supernova-driven galactic-outflows. Supernovae (SNe) are a well known source of energy/momentum deposition into the Interstellar Medium (ISM), which might be responsible for driving galactic winds (outflows). There has been significant progress on the theoretical and numerical modelling of this process at the extreme of the dynamical scales: the (small-scale) Supernova-Remnant (SNR)-ISM interaction and the (large-scale) galactic wind impact on the properties of the host galaxy. What remains comparatively less studied is the link between these scales. In this project, the student will make an inventory of the energy/momentum budget from SNRs in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC; where a large sample of SNRs is available) to check whether or not our current understanding of energy deposition at small scales is self-consistent with the SNe-driven galactic outflow observed in the LMC.

Condensed matter physics projects

Viðar Guðmundsson, Professor

  • Various aspects of time-dependent non equilibrium transport
    of electrons through nanoscale electron systems in photon
    cavities. Effects of interactions system shapes, and external
    magnetic field.
  • Linear and non-linear optical properties of interacting electrons
    in systems of reduced dimensions, quantum dots, wires and
    two-dimensional electron gas in magnetic fields.

All projects rely on analytical and numerical calculations using parallel processing power of clusters through FORTRAN, OpenMP, and CUDA for GPU-processing. The mixture of analytical and numerical methods stems from the use of functional spaces where possible rather than grids.

High-energy physics projects

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