Cosmological Simulations

As part of my Ph.D., I extended the GPU hydrodynamics solver CHOLLA to run cosmological simulations by including gravity, dark matter particles, a comoving frame to account for the expansion of the universe, and hydrogen and helium ionization and radiative cooling/heating.

 

Relevant Projects:

Below are the most relevant projects that I have worked on

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Synthetic Lyman-alpha Forest

From the simulations, I measure the neutral hydrogen density and the temperature and velocity of the gas from which I compute the Lyman-alpha transmitted flux. I compare the statistical properties of the simulated spectra to the observations to constrain models for the physics that determine the structure of the intergalactic medium.

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Temperature of the IGM

By running hundreds of high-resolution simulations varying the photoionization and photoheating rates from the radiation emitted by early galaxies and quasars, and comparing to the observational Lyman-alpha flux power spectrum, we are able to determine the ionization and temperature history of the intergalactic medium.

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Constraints on Warm Dark Matter

From a massive grid of more than 1000 cosmological simulations, we constrain the warm dark matter particle mass by comparing to the observed small-scale power spectrum of the Lya forest

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Simulated Telescope Images

Realistic images that simulate the observations of next-generation facilities like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

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Interactive 3D Volume Render

I developed a python + CUDA ray-tracing renderer for 3D grid data. The renderer can be used interactively on a local system or remotely to render time-evolving animations.