Matthew Turk's Homepage - Astrophysics

In June of 2009, I received my PhD from Stanford University, under the guidance of Dr. Tom Abel, with a thesis entitled "The Formation of Primordial Protostars."

We run ab initio cosmological simulations of the early universe. Typically I run on the scale of 300 comoving kiloparsecs. The simulations are initialized from a primordial power spectrum and very basic principles of physics govern their evolution. I like to say that we take physics and gas, put them in a box, shake it really hard, and then out falls structures, and stars, and eventually galaxies. This is a gross oversimplification of the specifics, but in general it is a very accurate description.

This is all done via the code Enzo, an Adaptive Mesh Refinement code. We run at extremely high resolutions -- in simulations on the scale of kiloparsecs, like what I run, we can resolve all the way down to within the radius of the Earth! (In one particular simulation, the smallest cell size was just under 200 miles -- that's a dynamic range of 1e15!) We utilize supercomputing resources for this task, and we have a suite of software for both visualizing and analyzing the results.

I am very interested in extending the physical model of our simulations by adding new and more realistic physics. Additionally, pushing our calculations to higher and higher resolution is a top priority. I am very interested in examining all aspects of these first structures -- their formation, evolution, death, and the manner in which they enrich the surrounding media, ultimately leading to further generations of objects.

Please feel free to email me if you're interested in what I work on! For the latest results, see my talk For some of my latest results, see my talk at First Stars III from July 2007, or the talk I gave at KITP in March of 2009. We published an article in Science Express in early July, 2009.

My CV is also available.