Stony Brook University SUNY Korea

Two high-impact computational science projects that include Stony Brook University faculty from the Department of Physics and Astronomy have been awarded supercomputer access from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science for 2022 through its Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. Through these awards, the research teams will be able to access the leadership-class supercomputers at DOE’s Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories.

The first project, “Approaching Exascale Models of Astrophysical Explosions,” includes Principal Investigator Professor Michael Zingale and co-investigators Associate Professor Alan Calder, Postdoctoral Associate Alice Harpole and PhD student Maria Barrios Sazo. 

Building on more than a decade of work, this project aims to produce models of burning and flame propagation on neutron stars as models for X-ray bursts (XRBs), investigate white dwarf mergers and the role of magnetic fields, and explore the end state of massive star convection. These are all multiscale, multiphysics problems whose calculation requires the coupling of hydrodynamics, magnetic fields, reactions, gravity and diffusion. The team’s XRB simulations will provide insight into the rapid proton capture process nucleosynthesis, connect with observations, and probe the structure of the underlying neutron star. A suite of white dwarf mergers, with and without magnetic fields, will be modeled, allowing the team to probe this system as a possible progenitor for Type Ia supernovae. Finally, the massive star research will provide important input (and an open simulation framework) to the core collapse modeling community.

Assistant Professor Sergey Syritsyn is a co-investigator on the other project, “Internal Structure of Strong Interaction Nambu-Goldstone Bosons.” This project aims to carry out precision lattice QCD calculations of the inner structures of the pion and kaon—the Nambu-Goldstone bosons in strong interactions — to determine their electromagnetic form factors, Fock-space distribution amplitudes, parton distribution functions and generalized parton distributions. These calculations are intended to provide experimental programs, such as the Jefferson Lab 12 GeV upgrade and the future Electron-Ion Collider, with comparisons and predictions. The results will help answer fundamental questions regarding spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in strong interactions, flavor symmetry violation, color confinement, and the origin of the mass of hadrons. Additionally, the distribution amplitudes are important inputs for deeply virtual meson production processes that are used to map out 3D images of the proton.