The Structure of the Universe: Cosmology, Exoplanets and Lattice QCD - supplementary grant
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Cambridge
Department Name: Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics
Abstract
The proposal will advance the ambitious goals set out in the STFC Consolidated Grant, entitled Unveiling the Structure of the Universe. In particular, it will advance the study of processes in the solar atmosphere, it will provide new tests of modified gravity, it will advance the application of new statistical tools to galaxy surveys, and it will support the computing and programming support for the simulation and modelling on which the whole grant depends.
Planned Impact
This grant will further world-leading work in cosmology, relativity and astrophysics which has a wide impact in the research community and beyond to the public. Both the work of John Barrow and Helen Mason is being supported through the grant, both of whom have a substantial role in outreach through the Millennium Mathematics Project and the Suntrek initiative, respectively.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Edward Shellard (Principal Investigator) |
Publications
Ade, P.A.R. And Others
(2016)
Planck 2015 results. XIII. Cosmological parameters
in A&A
Ade, P.A.R. And Others
(2016)
Planck 2015 results. XXI. The integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect
in A&A
Ade, P.A.R. And Others
(2016)
Planck 2015 results. XVII. Constraints on primordial non-Gaussianity
in A&A
Ade, P.A.R. And Others
(2016)
Planck 2015 results. XX. Constraints on inflation
in A&A
Akrami Y
(2015)
Bimetric gravity is cosmologically viable
in Physics Letters B
Baumann D
(2016)
Phases of new physics in the CMB
in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
Baumann D
(2016)
New Target for Cosmic Axion Searches.
in Physical review letters
Benkel R
(2016)
Dynamical scalar hair formation around a Schwarzschild black hole
in Physical Review D
Berti E
(2016)
Numerical relativity and high energy physics: Recent developments
in International Journal of Modern Physics D
Bisbas T
(2015)
starbench: the D-type expansion of an H ii region
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
| Description | The Atomic Astrophysics researcher on this grant was Dr Jeffrey Reep, who received funding for three months. His work focuses on hydrodynamic modelling of solar flares, as well as smaller heating events in the solar atmosphere. In these events, the transport of mass, momentum, and energy is crucial to understanding the radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum that we observe with many different instruments. The mechanism by which energy is released into the solar atmosphere is not fully understood, with there being a few possibilities: electron acceleration, thermal conductive heating, or magnetic wave generation. The problem is attacked in two manners: (1) directly studying the atmospheric response to different heating events and (2) forward modelling of emissions that can be compared against observations. Using the results of the simulations, we can then determine whether a given heating mechanism is consistent with what satellites observe. Dr Reep's membership of the Atomic Astrophysics group is extremely productive. He is very active in participating in group meetings, attending seminars etc., and he has been helping the younger members of the research group, discussing physics with them and showing them how to run the Hydrodynamic code. He is working on several collaborations and several research papers have been produced on solar flares. Dr Reep's gave two research seminars: In Cambridge, entitled "Solar Flare Modelling: Connecting Theory with Observation" and another at the International Space Science Institute in Bern, Switzerland, entitled "Explosive chromospheric evaporation modelling with HYDRAD." The researchers in the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology (CTC) funded by the grant were Dr James Fergusson and Dr Adam Solomon. During the six months Dr Fergusson was funded he was working predominantly on the Planck satellite experiment to produce the second release of Planck papers, further establishing the high impact this experiment has had on cosmology. Fergusson continued leading work on the non-Gaussian statistical analysis of the ESA Planck Satellite CMB data, now in both temperature and polarization. His most important contribution has been to the Planck Non-Gaussianity paper, in which he surveyed the widest variety of early universe models to date using the reconstructed three-point correlator or bispectrum. Using polarization data, he improved constraints by up to 50% for brane inflation scenarios (e.g. DBI inflation) and explored new domains in popular axion monodromy models. This work yielded a higher significance detection of the ISW-lensing bispectrum signal, produced by late-time gravitational lensing by large-scale structure, as well as providing hints of oscillatory signals for a variety of primordial periodic models. Investigation is ongoing with improved HPC efficiency and scalability essential for these computationally intensive calculations. Publications include desriptions of the development of innovative numerical algorithms for higher-order correlators which have been ported to the latest many-core (Xeon Phi) architectures. Adam Solomon was funded for two and a half months. He continued his investigations into massive gravity and its bimetric extension. These theories give the graviton a nonzero mass - and in the bimetric case contain an additional massless graviton - and may be able to explain the accelerated expansion of the Universe. In January he and his collaborators put out a paper studying the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect in bigravity and one on a mechanism for avoiding cosmological instabilities in bigravity while maintaining late-time acceleration. During this period he gave talks about his research at Queen Mary, the Extended Theories of Gravity workshop at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stockholm, and the Iberian Cosmology Meeting in Aranjuez, Spain. The grant also provided six months of funding for Mr James Briggs, the Parallel Programmer for the CTC's COSMOS supercomputer. He started a new collaborative project with a team of researchers headed by Pau Figueras (DAMTP) and Eugene Lim (KCL) into the continued development of a new numerical general relativity code called GRCHOMBO (see arXiv:1503.03436). The aim is to modernise the existing code to run efficiently on modern and future CPU architectures, such as the Intel Xeon Phi. This is an ongoing project. In December 2014 he gave a talk at the UK Many-core Conference in Cambridge (http://www.many-core.group.cam.ac.uk/ukmac2014/) on his work optimising the cosmological analysis code Modal3d to use the Intel Xeon Phi. He also co-authored an article for the Journal of Computational Physics on the work done on this code and its sister code, Modal2d. This article focuses on the algorithmic and mathematical innovations in the code as well as their efficient implementation on Intel Xeon Phi (it is included in the publications list). In collaboration with John Pennycook (Intel), Mr Briggs extended the work on Modal3d into a study of different implementations of nested multi-threaded programming on Intel Xeon Phi. To our knowledge this is the first study of this kind. This work was written up and will be published in the book High Performance Parallelism Pearls 2 by James Reinders and Jim Jeffers (both of Intel). He also attended the Intel Parallel Computing Centre conference in Dublin in February and the Intel HPC Roundtable in Oxford in March. During the period of the grant the CTC recruited another computer officer/parallel programmer who was funded by the grant for one month. This was Dr Kacper Kornet, who has started to familiarize himself with techniques used to port numerical codes to efficiently use Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. He has also put that knowledge to use by initiating the work on two projects. The first one involves vectorization and optimization of the finite difference two-fluid magnetohydrodynamics code used to simulate the evolution of solar prominences and flares. The second project concerns the investigation of self-gravitating turbulence in accretion disks. It uses publicly available Pluto code with some additional modules for calculations in shear box setups. Dr Kornet is particularly involved in designing, developing and subsequent optimization of an efficient Poisson solver which is well suited for such a configuration. |
| Exploitation Route | The scientific community in both cosmology and astrophysics will benefit from the significant advances and we are ensuring that it is widely disseminated through seminars, invited lectures, attendance at and organization of international conferences, and publications in scientific journals. Our computational work has also been exemplary in demonstrating the adoption of many-core HPC technologies and is having a wider impact through a deepening collaboration with Intel (as described elsewhere). There is also a much wider class of beneficiaries which includes school students, educators and the general public. Our investigators - notably John Barrow and Helen Mason, whose research was directly supported by this grant - have a unique standing through their promotion of the field through public lectures, radio, television, print interviews and popular books which reach a large audience. We also have general group outreach through web pages and National Science Week Open Days for schools and a wider audience. |
| Sectors | Education,Other |
| Description | The Cambridge Relativity and Gravitation group and the DAMTP Astrophysics group have had a worldwide impact, which continues to reach a broad public audience with our research results used by the wider research community - a notable example being the Planck 2015 results which within a few months are already well referenced (the Planck 2013 papers were among the most highly cited in all physics). In particular, we made leading contributions to the Planck non-Gaussianity paper which has already received 40 citations and further results were reported in the Planck Inflation paper (180 cites). The Planck results were widely reported in the broadcast and print media and, more locally, formed the basis of public outreach displays during the Cambridge Science Week in March 2015, together with demonstrations, tours and posters associated with solar physics, astrophysics, and the high performance computing supported by this grant. Among our investigators whose research was directly supported by this grant are John Barrow (Millenium Mathematics Project, see www.plus.maths.org) and Helen Mason (SunTrek outreach and website: www.suntrek.org), who are well known for their impact in public outreach. The Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, which currently houses and operates the COSMOS supercomputer, also remains at the forefront of computational science and notably the adoption of new many-core HPC architectures (we are early adopters of Intel's Xeon Phi coprocessors, with the first large shared-memory system to be accelerated); the group also hosts the COSMOS Intel Parallel Computing Center which focuses on utilizing this new highly parallel and energy-efficient technology. Part of the work supported on this grant included code modernisation of the Planck higher-order correlator estimation code (MODAL). This work has led to a deepening collaboration with Intel Corporation and outcomes of this work are published as a chapter in the book "High Performance Parallelism Pearls 2", and will be the subject of high profile demonstrations and talks at the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt in July 2015. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2015 |
| Sector | Education,Other |
| Description | Science Festival 2015 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an open day or visit at my research institution |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Science Week 2015 within the University of Cambridge includes a popular open day at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences in which we participated actively. Apart from visualisation and other poster displays, a particularly popular activity was the tour of the COSMOS supercomputer. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | Web sites |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Our Centre for Theoretical Cosmology and COSMOS supercomputer websites include news stories of wide interest to the general public as well as more specialist audiences. These can be found at: www.ctc.cam.ac.uk www.cosmos.damtp.cam.ac.uk |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2012,2013,2014,2015,2016 |
| URL | http://www.ctc.cam.ac.uk |