Revealing the Structure of the Universe: From Extreme Gravity to Exoplanets

This is an ambitious proposal to advance our understanding of the structures observed in our Universe, ensuring the development of world-leading research in areas central to the Science Challenges in the STFC roadmap:

Confronting inflationary scenarios: The standard inflationary paradigm, in which the observed galaxies and other large-scale structure originated from quantum fluctuations in the early universe, is now being probed with increasing precision using Planck satellite and galaxy survey data. We will develop robust predictions from inflationary models and test these with a detailed statistical analysis of huge galaxy surveys and cosmic microwave maps. We will also advance our understanding of gravitational collapse to more precisely predict the distribution of galaxies in our Universe.

Scalar fields in the universe: from theory to observation: We will explore how astronomical observations can provide new information about fundamental physics. In particular, we will investigate whether there is astronomical evidence for additional scalar fields in the Universe which might lead to significant modifications to Einstein's theory of general relativity or other signatures. We will perform N-body simulations of clusters of galaxies to make precise observational predictions.

Black Holes and Gravitational Physics: Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime which form when black holes or neutron stars merge or in the supernova explosion of stars. They propagate across the universe at the speed of light and will enable us to view the universe in a qualitatively new way with gravitational wave detectors, like Advanced LIGO which are currently listening for these signals. We will study numerically and analytically the stability of black holes and the shape of their gravitational wave signals to help in this search.

Dynamics of Accretion Discs: Gaseous discs around young stars and black holes are ubiquitous in the Universe and drive some of its most fascinating and important processes. Of these this project addresses: warping of discs around black holes and in binary star systems, the great outbursts of energy that characterise nascent stellar systems and dwarf novae, and high-frequency oscillations from luminous discs around black holes. The thread linking these diverse phenomena is turbulence and magnetic fields in the gas, which we study through large-scale numerical simulations.

Formation, Evolution and Dynamics of Exoplanets: Planets are formed in dusty gaseous discs around young stars. We will study the properties of giant vortices in which solid material may be accumulated, examine the growth of newly formed planets as they accrete gas from the surrounding disc, discover how planets are heated by waves in the surrounding disc, and quantify the interactions between planets and their neighbours.

Tidal Interactions of Planets, Stars and Discs: We will study the long-term evolution of extrasolar planetary systems through their tidal interactions with the central star, which affect the spin and orbital motion and can cause planets to swell, migrate inwards and even be destroyed. We will also study the gravitational interactions of planets with the protoplanetary disc, which can generate large waves, cause elliptical motion or completely truncate the disc.

Our researchers have followed an established path to high impact with societal and economic benefits over many years. The beneficiaries of our societal impacts are school students, teachers, and the public. The beneficiaries of our economic impacts are creative industries and high-performance computing (HPC) companies over the 3yr grant. Our impacts improve cultural life and economically benefit technical industries. They attract students into A-level physics and university course. Our societal impacts are vital for the continuing government support of our science. We are all, directly or indirectly, the beneficiaries of the specific societal impacts that our grant investigators contribute.
Hawking makes the largest public impact of any scientist worldwide. He attracts huge audiences. Highlights are his book The Grand Design, and TV series Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking. His impact at international level is shown by the US Presidential Medal of Science, and role as narrator in the 2012 Paralympic Opening Ceremony (> 11M UK viewers). He is giving the 2016 BBC Reith Lectures on Black Holes and is on the cover of the 23/1/16 Radio Times. More than 58,000 requests were made for 300 seats at the recordings. Hawking's books ( > 10M copies sold of A Brief History of Time and 1.4M of The Grand Design) and TV programmes (> 900,000 viewers of C4's Genius of Britain Hawking episode) contribute economic benefits to the UK through sales, foreign rights and syndication.
Barrow does major outreach work in cosmology for schools and the public. He was President of the BSA Mathematics section and gave the '100 Years of General Relativity' lecture at the BSA in 2015 and a webcast public talk at QMU's GR Centenary Meeting on 28/11/15. He gives ~25 cosmology lectures p.a. to schools and the public, including 2015 Science Festivals in Keswick, Bradford (x2), Cambridge, Turku, Orlando, Milan, Genoa, Rome, London and Valencia. His 22 books are in 28 languages and sales deliver UK economic benefit. Barrow also directs the Millennium Mathematics Project (MMP). Its Plus e-magazine (www.plus.maths.org) has huge impact (>1.8M visitors and 3M page-views p.a). It regularly features our research areas; eg https://plus.maths.org/content/search/node/cosmology https://plus.maths.org/content/search/node/planets.
Davis is a Gender Equality Champion for STEMM and recently talked on Gender Equality as a working cosmologist at the Valencia Conference on Gender and Science. She has important impact on schools and educators.
The Astrophysics group works on exoplanets (Projects 4-6). There will be major public impact in this area. We will work through the new Cambridge Exoplanet Centre, which has funds allocated for impact, with the Cambridge Science Festival, MMP, Naked Scientists, the Cambridge Science Centre, and Guerilla Science.
The Relativity group runs the COSMOS Supercomputer as part of the wider STFC DiRAC HPC Facility. It makes substantial economic and industrial impact in the HPC world. COSMOS received Intel Parallel Computing Centre (IPCC) status in 2014, joining an elite group of international HPC centres. This reflects a substantial 10-yr collaboration with Intel and SGI (see letters of support), recognised by the 2015 HPCwire Award. With SGI we co-designed the COSMOS UV2000 system for the 2012 DiRAC procurement. A tangible outcome was the new physical housing for the Xeon Phi in the system, called "MG-blade", now used in SGI UV2000 & UV3000 worldwide. The COSMOS IPCC worked with Intel's OSPRay team to create new visualisation capabilities that were publically demonstrated at ISC2015 with Planck bispectrum data. A later OSPRay demo at SC2015 with SGI+Intel showed real-time remote analysis of a huge 10TB domain wall simulation. Our chapter (Nested Parallelism in Practice) in High Performance Parallelism Pearls, the standard text, received the prestigious HPCwire 2015 Readers' Choice Award for "Best Use of High Performance Data Analytics".