Dr Charlotte Welker

I am a research associate in the theory and computation team. I study the evolution of galaxies in the early and late universe using elaborate hydrodynamical simulations such as the cosmological Horizon-AGN simulation. I put a particular focus on the interplay between galaxies and their large scale environment: the cosmic web.

This network of under-dense voids, low density walls and high density filaments and nodes of matter are the natural environment in which galaxies are born, drift and evolve accreting matter from cosmic flows and fellow galaxies. (See pictures for a view of the density field, the vorticity field and the vorticity alignment to filaments in . The vorticity is a quantity that measures the flow’s local tendency to whirling. Last picture shows the typical cross-section of a filament, with vorticity alignement field in colors and galaxies plotted as circles)

I am an advanced user of the hydrodynamical AMR code RAMSES (Teyssier et al 2002) and of the filament extractor DisPerSe (Sousbie et al 2011). I also develop Fortran and Yorick routines to perform fast statistical analysis of the gas dynamics and properties in large scale and high resolution simulations. Contact me for more information.