European cooperation in multidisciplinary projects at the frontier of knowledge

Solar prominence. Credit: NASA.
Solar prominence. Credit: NASA.
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The IAC scientist and CSIC Research Professor, Javier Trujillo Bueno, together with Luca Belluzzi, of the Istituto Ricerche Solari Locarno (Switzerland), and Rolf Krause, of the Institute of Computational Science (Switzerland), have been awarded a “Synergy Grant” of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF). The purpose of these important research grants is to support multidisciplinary projects of world-wide scientific excellence.

Thanks to this “Synergy Grant”, these researchers and their respective teams, including Jiri Stepan, of the Astronomical Institute (Czech Republic), will be able to work jointly on a very complex solar physics research problem whose solution requires synergies between the quantum theory of the generation and transfer of polarized radiation in magnetized plasmas and high-performance computational techniques (HPC).

The title of the project selected by the SNF is “HPC-techniques for 3D modeling of resonance line polarization with partial frequency redistribution (PRD)”. The Selection Committee concluded that this “Synergy Grant” will facilitate the work of an excellent multidisciplinary team of scientists, mainly physicists and mathematicians, to solve jointly a complex solar physics problem.

“The research goals are of key importance for solar and stellar physics”, says Javier Trujillo Bueno, whose IAC research group has pioneered the development of methods to explore the magnetism of the outer solar atmosphere.

Solving the problem of the generation of polarized radiation in three-dimensional magnetized plasmas taking into account quantum interference effects between different atomic levels is of fundamental importance to understand the unprecedented spectro-polarimetric observations coming from the most advanced telescopes, such as the future European Solar Telescope (EST).

Contact at the IAC: Javier Trujillo Bueno (jtb [at] iac.es (jtb[at]iac[dot]es))

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