ERC Advanced Investigator Grants are each worth up to 2.5 million (in exceptional cases as much as 3.5 million) euros over 5 years, and are intended for established researchers in all disciplines who wish to undertake highly ambitious and innovative projects that promise to break new ground in their respective fields.
Klaus Dolag is an astrophysicist, a specialist in computer-assisted cosmology, and Head of the Computational Center for Particle and Astrophysics in the Munich-based Cluster of Excellence “ORIGINS”. Throughout his scientific career, Dolag has focused on simulating the processes that gave rise to the large-scale structures that characterize the observable Universe, and has developed completely new models to study their evolution. For example, he created the first simulation that explicitly incorporated the contribution of magnetic fields to the formation of galaxy clusters.
COMPLEX: Combination of large- and small-scale simulations
In his ERC project (acronym ‘COMPLEX’) he plans to refine his simulation models still further. In essence, his goal is to successfully combine the essential features of models that were developed to capture the evolution of structure on very different scales. This would enable simulations to trace the formation of very large-scale structures such as galaxy clusters, while at the same time taking processes that act on much smaller length scales – such the physics of plasmas – into account. This approach aims at identifying the key processes responsible for determining the detailed composition of largest known structures in the Universe. Dolag will use his ERC Advanced Grant to assemble a team of researchers who will investigate these issues in detail numerically with the aid of newly designed computer-based models.
Klaus Dolag obtained his PhD in 2000 for work done at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching. He joined the Department of Computational Astrophysics at LMU in 2010, and completed his Habilitation in 2012. Years of experience in the development of numerical algorithms and codes have enabled him to make pioneering contributions to complex simulations of the evolution of structure in the cosmos, including the most detailed and data-intensive hydrodynamic simulation of cosmic evolution ever undertaken – Magneticum Pathfinder. As a leading member of the International Planck Collaboration, he has shared several important prizes, including the 2018 Gruber Cosmology Prize.
Contact
PD Dr. Klaus Dolag
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Universitäts-Sternwarte München
Scheinerstr. 1
D-81679 München
Tel. +49 89 2180 5994
email: dolag(at)usm.lmu.de
