A German translation of the public-outreach movie on the recent breakthrough made at the AEI has been produced and can be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXjbYA5mSFo
The original English version can instead be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow9JCXy1QdY
These movies, together with other non-official releases, total about 80,000 views on YouTube.
Dr. Seth Hopper joins the numerical-relativity group as new postdoc working on binary black holes. Dr.Hopper has just received his PhD from the University of North Carolina with a thesis on “Gravitational Waveforms of Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals”.
A simulation performed on our supercomputer cluster shows that the collision oftwo neutron stars can naturally produce the magnetic structures thought to power the high-speed particle jets associated with short gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). The study provides the most detailed glimpse of the forces driving some of the universe’s most energetic explosions. You can read here our press releases in German/English or find some images and movies of our simulations. See also NASA’s coverage and NASA’s movie.
Professor Tomasz Bulik, of the University of Warsaw, has arrived at the institute for a three day visit. He will be giving a seminar on “Stellar mass binary black holes: formation scenarios and merger rates”.
It is a great honour and pleasure for us to announce that the 2010 IOP Gravitational Physics Group’s Thesis Prize, which is co-sponsored by Classical and Quantum Gravity, was awarded to Dr Barry Wardell, a member of the AEI Numerical Relativity group.
The prize was awarded in light of ground-breaking computational techniques, developed by Dr Barry Wardell during his PhD at University College Dublin, for obtaining highly accurate expressions for Green functions on curved spacetime. The full thesis is titled “Green functions and radiation reaction from a spacetime perspective” and is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.2634.
The prize will be awarded at IOP’s Nuclear and Particle Physics Divisional (NPPD) conference at Glasgow University on 6 April. Dr Wardell will receive the prize shortly before his talk.
More information on the award may is available at
http://www.iop.org/activity/groups/subject/gp/prize/page_40694.html.
Following the tradition started a few years ago, the members of the Numerical Relativity Group and of the IT Department would like to invite you to the 2011 edition of the Cluster-Day@AEI. As in the past, the meeting is meant as a forum to exchange experiences mainly in the use but also in the management of High Performance Compute Clusters, as well as a way to report on new approaches and future strategies in the supercomputing world.
The highlight of the event will be the official inauguration of the new HPC-cluster Datura. We have invited the Brandenburg Minister of Science, Research and Culture, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dr. Sabine Kunst to give an opening address.
More information can be found here
The group is hosting the spring meeting of the SFB/TR7. More information can be found here
Riccardo Ciolfi, who recently finished his PhD Thesis from the University of Rome La-Sapienza, has arrived at the AEI to work with us for several months. He will be continuing his study of the structure and equilibria of magnetized neutron stars.
The website of the Numerical Relativity group has been replaced with a new version. The new site is built using WordPress, which will hopefully make it much easier to keep up-to-date.
Three postdoctoral positions are anticipated for 2011-2012. More information here