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Dear Professor MacFayden,

My name is Alexa Staley and I am a senior at Bowoin College in Brunswick, Maine. I am a physics major and math minor in pursuit of a PhD. in physics. I am very interested in the physics graduate program at NYU, and will be submitting my application shortly.

During my time at Bowdoin I have focused on general relativity, and this past summer I conducted research in the field of numerical relativity. More specifically, I created a code in Fortran 90 that simulates the collapse of a spherically symmetric dust cloud of uniform density and zero pressure into a Schwarzschild black hole. As you might know, Oppenheimer and Snyder have an analytical solution to this collapse; my project entails verifying this collapse in another coordinate system called the "moving puncture" coordinate, which is now widely used in numerical relativity. I will continue this research throughout the academic year and my work will culminate with a thesis paper that I will present to the Physics Department in the spring.

I understand that your research is in computational astrophysics, which is a field that I am interested in. At your convenience, I would love to hear more about your research.

Thanks,
Alexa

Dear Alexa,

Thanks for writing. Your message is timely. I and my group at NYU are working on several projects in computational astrophysics, particularly focusing on relativistic gas dynamics and very recently including coupling to dynamical space times. We are very much starting to move into numerical relativity with an eye toward accurate inclusion of gas dynamics relevant for neutron star-black hole and neutron star-neutron star binaries. We are motivated by advanced LIGO which I'm sure you are aware is scheduled to be on line starting in 2014 and is expected to detect double neutron star mergers to several 100 Mpc distances at which the event rate should be sufficient to yield detections.

A graduate student in my group has recently written an Einstein/hydro code in 1D to simulate black hole formation during collapse of massive stars. Our goal is to extend this code to 3D using efficient adaptive mesh refinement on massively parallel computers to simulate black hole mergers at very high resolution.

I am on sabbatical at Harvard this coming semester. But I will stay in touch with the application process. Good luck with your application.

Best Wishes,

Andrew

Fyi