CODE DEVELOPMENT
In recent years, a third pillar of the scientific method has emerged alongside theory and observations: numerical simulations. I routinely develop algorithms or patches for state-of-the-art simulations codes for my own research. Two of these have been published.
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During my Master Thesis work I developed a standalone code - called ZInCo - to produce initial conditions for zoom-in cosmological simulations, starting from another set of existing, uniform-resolution initial conditions.
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Recently, I developed a new approach to the production of lightcones from large cosmological simulations. In this Dynamic Zoom Simulation (DZS) approach, the resolution of the simulation is dynamically adjusted during the run. Particles outside of the lightcone are grouped together in order to reduce the workload while preserving the large-scale gravitational field. This approach can be easily used in all particle-based codes. After being implemented in the Gadget-3 code, DZS improved the performance by 50% in dark-matter-only test runs and will boost efficiency much more in realistic settings.
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Above: Comparison of a standard simulation (left) and a DZS one (right). The structures inside the lightcone (orange dashed circle) are unchanged, while outside of it the simulation resolution is degraded progressively, while maintaining the large scale gravitational field.
Above: Example of zoom-in initial conditions produced by ZInCo. The left panel shows a normal zoom, while the right one shows a 'cascade' zoom-in, where many different regions are progressively refined.