Project Grant 2206713

This $318,259 project grant from the National Science Foundation's Mathematical and Physical Sciences program will fund research into tidal disruption events involving supermassive black holes. A collaborative team from the University of California, Santa Cruz, University of California, Berkeley, and Northwestern University will conduct computational modeling and numerical experiments to advance understanding of key physical processes governing stellar tidal disruptions and the subsequent formation and evolution of accretion disks. The investigators aim to isolate and study the disruption mechanism itself, debris disk formation, jet production, and radiation generation through multi-scale simulations. Additionally, the award supports an education and public outreach initiative pairing computational astrophysicists with students in visual arts and digital media. This partnership seeks to increase diversity in the field through cross-disciplinary training utilizing simulation outputs. Insights from this research have the potential to enhance knowledge of supermassive black hole properties, nuclear stellar dynamics, and black hole accretion physics under well-defined tidal disruption conditions.