| The genesis and evolution of astrophysical objects has one common denominator: continuum mechanics. Since practically all cosmic matter is gaseous, this boils down to hydrodynamics. Numerical hydrodynamics in astrophysics is in the process of breaking through two barriers: first, the inclusion of the realistic treatment of many more physical processes, in particular multi-fluid interaction and radiative transfer; second, the extension to fully three-dimensional flow. Breaking through these barriers requires the integration of a number of techniques: adaptive mesh refinement (AMR), parallelization, and integration of numerical hydrodynamics with other branches of numerical astrophysics, such as N-body calculations for gravity, and radiative transfer. The techniques for coping with these have become so far-reaching and so specialized, that it is no longer feasible to build them all locally. Consequently, it makes sense to import expertise. At this stage of our development, we are experiencing an acute need for a PhD-level researcher who is expert in computational (astro)physics. It is this need we are trying to meet by this proposal. Although the computational methods we seek are generally applicable, our concurrent aim here is to address the important issue of coupling radiative transfer to gravitational instability in cosmic structure formation. |
