High Energy Density Plasma & Laboratory Plasma Astrophysics: The Flash Center is capitalizing on the opportunities made possible by high-power lasers and the unique capabilities of the FLASH code, using laboratory experiments to make major advances in our understanding of fundamental physical processes that are essential to understanding a wide range of objects and phenomena in astrophysics. Our recent achievements in demonstrating the turbulent dynamo in the laboratory using high-intensity laser experiments has led to the advancement of our goals into new and exciting territories within High Energy Density Plasma and Laboratory Plasma Astrophysics: To demonstrate supersonic turbulent dynamo and the characterization of compressible, radiative, magnetized turbulence; and investigate transport and acceleration of cosmic rays and their interplay with magnetized turbulence.
High-Energy Density Physics: The Flash Center's HEDP Initiative through Argonne National Laboratory added capabilities to the FLASH code to make it a highly capable toolset for the academic HEDP community. The initiative was jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Simulation and Computing Program in the National Nuclear Security Administration and the (DOE) Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research in the Office of Science.
Thermonuclear-Powered Supernovae: Thermonuclear-powered (Type Ia) supernovae are among the most powerful explosions in the universe. They are the source of many of the c\ hemical elements that make up planets and life on Earth. These events are also among the most accurate “cosmic yardsticks.” Observation\ s using them revealed that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating and led to the discovery of dark energy. Recent observati\ ons and extraordinary large-scale computer simulations have provided new insights into the nature of these explosions. The goal of the \ Flash Center's Type Ia supernova project is to understand these explosions better, and by doing so, help observers use them to determin\ e the properties of dark energy. This project is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Fluid-Structure Interaction: The object of this project was to develop petascale tools applicable to multi-body, fluid-structure interactions in laminar and turbulent flows. In particular the project targeted applications in dense suspensions of deformable particles, such as whole-blood simulations from first principles. It was an NSF-funded collaborative project involving a multidisciplinary team from the University of Maryland and the University of Chicago with expertise in computational mechanics, multiscale modeling and parallel computing.
Implicit Solvers: The aim of this NSF-funded project was to implement a fully implicit solver in FLASH for stiff hyperbolic and parabolic systems. Such "stiff" systems arise in many nonlinear physics involving wide ranges of both length and time scales that are challenging to simulate.