Issue 1, 2014
Issue 1, 2009
Nordita welcomes two new long-term visitors:
Einar H. Guðmundsson received his PhD in Physics from the University of Copenhagen in 1981. His adviser was C. J. Pethick. He has worked in the fields of Neutron Stars (including magnetic neutron stars, Thomas-Fermi theory of matter in a strong magnetic field, neutron star envelopes, supernovae and neutrino trapping), Gamma-Ray Burst Afterglows (including their relation to the hosts galaxies of gamma-ray bursts), and Cosmology (including questions concerning the cosmological constant, evolution of galaxy clusters, gravitational lensing, evolution of the Universe, classical cosmological tests, cosmic microwave background, and the history and philosophy of cosmology). Einar is staying for two months and is sitting in 122:030 in the Nordita Astrophysics building.
Daniel Sunhede is visiting from the University of Jyväskylä. His advisor was Kimmo Kainulainen. Daniel is working on dark energy, scalar-tensor gravity and large extra dimensions. More recently he has been working on spherically symmetric spacetimes in metric f(R) gravity. Daniel is staying for three months and is sitting in 133:010 in the Nordita main building.
Nordita welcomes the three new PhD students who arrived in February: Fabio Del Sordo, who did his Master's thesis at the University of Pisa on the auroral ultraviolet emission and the connection with exoplanets, Koen Kemel, who did his Master's thesis at Gent University in Belgium on cold plasma discharges, and Simon Candelaresi, who did his Master's thesis at the University of Stuttgart on dielectric broadband spectroscopy. They have been accepted as graduate students at the Institute of Astronomy and will be supported through the ERC project on Astrophysical Dynamos. Nordita received altogether 27 applications.
NORDITA is presently recruiting one full professor and one assistant professor. The recruitment process for these positions is still in progress. The recruitment for Nordita Fellowships is now completed. Four applicants to the fellow positions have accepted to join Nordita in Fall 2009:
There are more positions to be filled within the AstroDyn project. In addition to the three PhD students that have already arrived, one more will arrive in August. Offers for the two post-doc positions have gone out and the following two applicants have now accepted:
The hiring of an assistant professor within the AstroDyn project is still in progress.
Some of us have now moved permanently to the neighboring house, just to the left of the main Nordita building. It carries the official name Roslagstullsbacken 17, and internally at AlbaNova it is referred to as house 12. Correspondingly, the room numbers start with 122, where the second 2 refers to floor 2 (which is actually the ground floor since the count starts at 1 in the basement). For example, Ulf Wahlgren is now sitting in 122:003 and Axel Brandenburg is stitting in 122:028. The PhD students from the AstroDyn project are sitting in 122:027. This nomenclature is rather obscure and therfore we usually refer to the "other" Nordita building (or the Nordita Astrophysics building since this is where the participants in the AstroDyn project are now housed).
The program for the Nordita-Day in Stockholm is now available.
Nordita in April
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During May there will a 7.5 point PhD course on solar physics and magnetohydrodynamics will be taught at Nordita. Students interested in this should look at www.nordita.org/science/courses and contact Axel Brandenburg; see also www.nordita.org/~brandenb/teach/solar for more details.
The next NORDITA Master Class in Physics will be in Hillerød (Denmark) and will run from 26 July 2009 to 01 August 2009
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The first evaluation of Nordita in Stockholm will be carried out during the spring of 2009. An evaluation committee has been appointed and a site visit is planned for 2-3 April, 2009.
12 June 2009 is a tentative date for the next meeting of the Nordita Board in Stockholm. An extended 2-day meeting will be 3-4 September, with scientific presentations and informal discussions on the Thursday, and the actual Board meeting on the Friday.
6-10 April 2009
A meeting on the occasion of the 50th birthday of Axel Brandenburg (Nordita, Stockholm, Sweden). The location has been chosen in Finland, where the academic career of Axel has started. The scope of the meeting covers the broad range of Axel's research interests, from planets to the Sun and stars, to galaxies, and to the Early Universe, with emphasis on the role and origin of magnetic fields, and on numerical experiments. Axel has published with about 130 coauthors. The purpose of the meeting is to bring together leading experts in these research areas, many of whom will inevitably -- but not exclusively -- be Axel's friends and coauthors.
The venue will be the Kiljavanranta Conference Centre located by the lake Sääksjärvi about 50 km from Helsinki (and 35 km from the Helsinki-Vantaa airport, and 10 km from the nearest town, Nurmijärvi). The Centre provides excellent working environment and attractive leisure facilities.
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17-21 August 2009
Several different types of surveys are currently aiming at detecting signatures from the era beyond redshift 6, which is when the reionization of the Universe happened. Each of these surveys is at the cutting edge of what is possible, and detecting the desired signatures will be challenging. However, by comparing or cross-correlating the same areas on the sky between different data sets, a clearer detection may be possible.
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Currently running: 6 - 28 March 2009
The environmental and health effects of nanomaterials are of global concern, both in view of assessing the impact of nanomaterials discharged into nature and for a safe and transparent development of nanotechnology, especially in relation to novel applications in biomedicine. At present, nanomaterials are already produced at an industrial scale and the number of consumer products featuring nanomaterials is increasing at a rapid pace. At the same time, detailed understanding of the potential biological and ecological effects of nanomaterials and the related legislation are clearly lagging behind. Some of the key questions related to these issues are the transport, uptake and transformation of nanomaterials in air, soil and natural waters, as well as within biological organisms.
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30 March 2009 to 30 April 2009
The organizers, Tommy Ohlsson, Joakim Edsjö, Steen Hannestad, and Stefan Hofmann intend to keep the program fairly open regarding seminars, thus giving more time for actual research and discussing future research projects among the participants of the program. The aim is to have a couple of seminars each week during the running time of the program. In addition to the seminars, there will be a number of informal meetings to specifically discuss future progress in the various subtopics covered by the program and to have time to do actual work among the participants. The research topics to be covered at the program are: neutrino physics, dark matter, cosmology, supersymmetry, dark energy, inflation, extra dimensions, ultra-high energy cosmic rays, supernovae, leptogenesis.
→ Details and application form
4 May to 13 June 2009
Relativistic jets are responsible for the huge luminosities seen in active galactic nuclei and gamma-ray bursts and are probably launched from the central black holes in these objects. The details of the jet launching mechanism, its acceleration, mechanisms of the energy dissipation, particle acceleration and the emission remain unknown. The aim of this Nordita program is to bring experts in different fields together to make a serious progress in our understanding of the physics of relativistic flows.
→ Details and application form
15 June to 31 July 2009
The exciting prospect of exploring the Higgs sector of the Standard Model and its presumed extensions at the LHC has renewed interest in electroweak baryogenesis (EWB) and the electroweak phase transition (EWPT). At the same time, constraints on CP violation, which is generically present in extensions of the Standard Model, will be tightened by new Electric Dipole Moment (EDM) experiments. Further into the future, there is the possibility of probing a first-order electroweak phase transition directly using the space-based gravitational wave detector LISA.
→ Details and application form
→ Link to electronic preprints: www.nordita.org/preprints
Lars Samuelsson and Nils Andersson
If you have information about meetings or other items that would be useful to include in Nordita News, please send it to Anne Jifält, Nordita, email: anne@kth.se.