Basel Universität
Departement für Physik und Astronomie
Departement für Physik und Astronomie

Prof. Dr. M. Liebendörfer

Assistant Professor (SNF)
Department of Physics
University of Basel
Klingelbergstrasse 82
CH-4056 Basel

office 1.21
tel.: +41 61 267 37 00
fax: +41 61 267 37 84
e-mail:
group page: http://www.physik.unibas.ch:/~liebend/people
research page: http://www.physik.unibas.ch:/~liebend/project
teaching
Collaborations & Publications

administrative assistants
Barbara Kammermann
e-mail:
Astrid Kalt
e-mail:
tel.: +41 (0)61 267 3687
fax: +41 (0)61 267 3784


Short Biography

I finished my studies in Theoretical Physics, Mathematics and Philosophy at the University of Basel with a Diploma thesis on parity violation in nucleon-nucleon scattering and pion production. After a year of industrial research and development in the field of Antennas and Propagation with Ascom Systec AG, I started in parallel a PhD thesis with the title "Consistent modeling of core-collapse supernovae in spherically symmetric relativistic space-time". I received my PhD from the University of Basel in 2000. The developed general relativistic supernova models with Boltzmann neutrino transport led to an award of the Swiss Physical Society, which I received during my ensuing postdoctoral stage at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (USA). In 2002 I moved on to the Canadian Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto (CA), where I became Jeffrey L. Bishop Fellow in 2003. With experience in parallel computing and multi-dimensional magnetohydrodynamics I returned to Basel in 2005 to lead a research project in the framework of a Foerderprofessur of the Swiss National Science Foundation.



Research Summary

Macroscopic phenomena in nature - in astrophysics and on Earth - often originate from the interaction of tightly coupled microscopic processes with different characteristic length and time scales. We develop efficient transport/hydrodynamics algorithms in the context of gravitational collapse and supernova explosions. A reliable numerical link between the input physics and the observables in distant astrophysical objects provides new information about matter under otherwise inaccessible conditions, or conversely, allows the prediction of a large-scale evolution based on better-known input physics, e.g. in atmospheres and oceans.



Publications

  1. Liebendörfer, M., Whitehouse, S. C., Fischer, T. 2009, "The isotropic diffusion source approximation for supernova neutrino transport", ApJ, in press, arXiv:0711.2929
  2. Sagert, I., Fischer, T., Hempel, M., Pagliara, G., Schaffner-Bielich, J., Mezzacappa, A., Thielemann, F.-K., Liebendörfer, M. 2009, "Signals of the QCD phase transition in core-collapse supernovae", Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 081101
  3. Scheidegger, S., Fischer, T., Whitehouse, S. C., Liebendörfer, M. 2008, "Gravitational waves from 3D MHD core collapse simulations", A&A 490, 231
  4. Fröhlich, C.; Martinez-Pinedo, G.; Liebendörfer, M.; Thielemann, F.-K.; Bravo, E.; Hix, W. R.; Langanke, K.; Zinner, N. T. 2006, "Neutrino-Induced Nucleosynthesis of A>64 Nuclei: The neutrino-p Process", Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 142502
  5. Liebendörfer, M.; Rampp, M.; Janka, H.-Th.; Mezzacappa, A. 2005, "Supernova Simulations with Boltzmann Neutrino Transport: A Comparison of Methods", ApJ 620, 840