Computational Modelling Group

Dr. Ian Hawke

Position
Lecturer
Institution
Mathematics (FSHS)
Webpage
http://www.personal.soton.ac.uk/ih3/index.shtml
Contact
Complete this online contact form to contact Ian.

Ian is a lecturer in the Relativity and Gravitation group of the School of Mathematics. His focus is on calculations of gravitational waves in full General Relativity, typically from the collapse and merger of massive objects such as neutron stars.

Ian is a main author and developer of the Whisky code for relativistic hydrodynamics within the Cactus framework. This performs large-scale finite difference and finite volume simulations with mesh refinement provided through the Carpet driver on which he also works.

Research Interests

Physical Systems and Engineering simulation: Astrophysics, CFD, Elasticity, General Relativity, Magnetohydrodynamics, Structural dynamics

Algorithms and computational methods: Finite differences, Multi-physics

Visualisation and data handling software: Gnuplot, HDF5, VisIt, VTK

Software Engineering Tools: CVS, Git, SVN

Programming languages and libraries: C, C++, Fortran, Maple, Matlab, MPI, PETSc, Python

Computational platforms: Iridis, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows

Transdisciplinary tags: HPC, Scientific Computing

Ian's team members

Tim Lemon
Postgraduate Research Student, Mathematics (FSHS)
John Muddle
Postgraduate Research Student, Mathematics (FSHS)

Joint projects with...

Carsten Gundlach
Professor, Mathematics (FSHS)
Ian Jones
Lecturer, Mathematics (FSHS)

Projects

Gravitational waves from neutron stars

High-resolution shock-capturing (HRSC) methods for elastic matter in general relativity

With Carsten Gundlach (Investigator)

Numerical Elastic Neutron Stars

With Ian Jones (Investigator), Andrew Penner

Relativistic multifluids

Whisky Code

Gallery

An iron core collapses prior to explosion in a supernova. The rapid rotation leads to the oblate density isocontours, and the violent behaviour near bounce leads to the emitted gravitational waves. [Ott, Dimmelmeier, Hawke, Schnetter, Kahler]

The relative velocity between two interacting relativistic multifluids. The coupling between the fluids leads to a two-stream instability, with important implications for neutron star oscillations. [Hawke, Andersson, Comer, Samuelsson]