This three-year, $598,710 project grant from the National Science Foundation's Mathematical and Physical Sciences program will fund research and education activities at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of Maryland, College Park focused on investigating electromagnetic precursor transients to gravitational wave events through computational simulations. Caltech will lead the research effort to perform the first numerical simulations of the crustal shattering mechanism hypothesis for precursor production and calculate emission efficiencies from relativistic magnetic reconnection applicable to compact object mergers. The universities will also explore novel radiative regimes in strong magnetic fields and model resulting X-ray photon spectra. In addition, Caltech will support a summer school program at the intersection of computational relativity and plasma astrophysics to train early career scientists. The research directly supports the NSF's mission to increase fundamental scientific knowledge and understanding of astrophysical problems through multi-messenger observations of neutron star-neutron star and neutron star-black hole mergers.
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