Dynamics

My experience with research was a project involving integrating the orbits of stars passing through the solitonic core of a fuzzy dark matter halo with Dr. Jerry Ostriker. I created an orbit integrator and manually made a Milky Way potential.

Unfortunately, I was not able to complete the investigation with Dr. Ostriker, however my time during this project infused me with a deep interest in dark matter and galactic dynamics. The deep interest I developed led me to conduct a self-led research project. My goal was to model the effect of two fuzzy dark matter halos merging. I used a FDM density profile from this [paper] and I used gravhopper to run a treecode simulation of the merger.

Although I made a few fundamental errors in regards to creating a self-consistent halo, the process of doing this project allowed me to see that research is something that I am driven to do and enjoy doing.

I recently worked at the Institute for Advanced Study on a project simulating the formation of stellar shells through galaxy mergers, with the presence of a fuzzy dark matter halo. In many ways, this project was a culmination of these two early projects that deeply impacted me.