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Gravity
David Neilsen

David Neilsen

Professor
Website:

N147 ESC
Provo, UT 84602

(801) 422-6078

Education

  • 1992 BS, Brigham Young University
  • 1995 MS, Brigham Young University
  • 1999 PhD, University of Texas at Austin

Positions

  • [2016—Present] Professor, Brigham Young University
  • [2017] Visiting Scientist, University of Utah
  • [2017] Visiting Scientist, Los Alamos National Laboratory
  • [2010—2016] Associate Professor, Brigham Young University
  • [2010] Visiting Scientist, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
  • [2004—2010] Assistant Professor, Brigham Young University
  • [2002—2004] Post-doctoral Researcher, Louisiana State University
  • [1999—2002] Post-doctoral Researcher, University of Texas at Austin

Research Interests

I enjoy using computers to solve challenging and important problems in physics. My research specialty is studying black holes, neutron stars, and gravitational waves using computer simulations computed on supercomputers. The equations that describe these systems come from general relativity, Einstein's model of gravity, and relativistic fluid dynamics. I use these simulations to compute gravitational radiation from merging black hole binaries. I am particularly interested in developing new computational methods to study some particularly challenging binary black hole systems that the next generation of gravitational wave detectors will observe.

Recent Papers

  • M. Fernando, D. Neilsen, E. Hirschmann, H. Sundar. "A scalable framework for adaptive computational general relativity on heterogeneous clusters," Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Supercomputing. ICS '19: 2019 International Conference on Supercomputing (2019).
  • M. Fernando, D. Neilsen, H. Lim, E. Hirschmann, H. Sundar. "Massively Parallel Simulations of Binary Black Hole Intermediate-Mass-Ratio Inspirals," SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, 41, C97-C138 (2018).
  • J. DeBuhr, B. Zhang, M. Anderson, D. Neilsen, E. Hirschmann, T. Grenga, S. Paolucci. "Relativistic Hydrodynamics with Wavelets." Astrophys. Journal, 867, 112 (2018).
  • L. Lehner, S.L. Liebling, C. Palenzuela, O.L. Caballero, E. O'Connor, "Unequal mass binary neutron star mergers and multimessenger signals," Class. Quantum Grav. 33, 184002 (2016).