Lucio Mayer

Personal homepage

https://www.astro.uzh.ch/~lmayer/

Research interests

My research interests span a wide range of topics in cosmic structure formation and evolution, at both large and small scales. The formation and evolution of galaxies, the origin, growth, pairing and coalescence process of supermassive black holes, and the formation of protoplanetary disks and massive planets (gas giants and Super-Earths) are among the main target areas. The common denominator of these diverse problems is the underlying physics, predominantly radiation hydrodynamics married
with self-gravity. Astrophysical disks are also a recurrent subject.
I heavily employ and contribute to the development of 3D hydro codes on supercomputing platforms, in particular the GASOLINE and ChaNGaSPH codes (http://www-hpcc.astro.washington.edu/tools/changa.html). Nonetheless, in my group we often combine the simulations with analytical and semi-analytical methods of investigation.

I am the Coordinator of the national PASC project DIAPHANE which aims at developing a powerful portable radiative transfer library for SPH and AMR hydro codes, for multiple astrophysical applications (http://www.pasc-ch.org/projects/projects/diaphane/) The research we carry out on supermassive black holes is tighly connected with gravitational wave science and the future eLISA mission of ESA. I am currently part of the eLISA Consortiumhttps://www.elisascience.org/sc-profiles?page=4, fostering and contributing to the theoretical research on supermassive black holes is laying down the path for the mission itself.