Peter Hammond

Research Interests

Binary neutron star mergers, general-relativistic radiation magnetohydrodynamics simulations, the neutron star equation of state, composition dependent effects in neutron star matter, artificial neural networks, and gravitational wave data analysis techniques.

About Peter Hammond

I am an astrophysicist whose main research goal is to deepen our knowledge of neutron stars, in particular the matter from which they are made. My primary tool for this is large scale general-relativistic radiation magnetohydrodynamics simulations. My work consists or running such simulations using a variety of HPC resources, and developing the codes we use for said simulations in order to include new, more relevant, and more accurate physics that better describes the systems I am interested in: binary neutron star mergers.

I am principally involved with the Athena family of codes, namely: GR-Athena++, an offshoot of Athena++ with support for dynamical spacetimes, realistic equations of state, and M1 moment-based neutrino radiation transport, and AthenaK, a new code aimed at leveraging GPUs for astrophysical simulations. I have been involved in the addition of finite-temperature, realistic equations-of-state in both codes, which we are currently using in GR-Athena++ to study phase transition and dark matter effects in BNSs. Below are some recent research highlights:

NQTs: Not-Quite-Transcendental functions used to accelerate the interpolation of equation-of-state tables in astrophysical codes.

GR-Athena++: GR-Athena++ is our offshot of the Athena++ code, with support for dynamical spacetimes and realistic equations-of-state.