ALcHyMiA - ERC Starting Grant

Elena Gaburro, Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Verona, is the Principal Investigator of her ERC Starting Grant research project ALcHyMiA, funded under the Horizon Europe programme of the European Union with a budget of 1.500.000 euros.

Elena, now 34 years old, has been a student of our Bachelor and Master degrees in Mathematics here at the University of Verona and she has also obtained her PhD in Mathematics in our joint PhD program with the University of Trento. She has multiple working experiences abroad as a visiting researcher in Spain and Germany, a tenured researcher position at Inria in France, and having presented her scientific achievements in more than 50 international events, all over the worlds, mostly on invitation. She has received several recognitions, the latest being the Peter Lax Award, attributed by the scientific committee of the HYP 2024 international conference. 

Last year, Elena, once awarded with the prestigious ERC grant, decided to come back to Italy and in particular she choose the University of Verona to carry out her research activities. 
About her project, Elena explains: “Understanding the mysterious origins of the Universe and its continuous expansion, exploring its remotest areas, or even getting inspired for novel sources of clean energies on the Earth, requires the capability of solving numerically large sets of complex, and highly nonlinear, partial differential equations expressing the laws that govern fluid mechanics, magnetohydrodynamics and the spacetime evolution according to the theory of general relativity.”  

She continues: “Such equations allow to simulate the evolution of accretion disks around supermassive black holes, the collision of binary neutron stars with the subsequent production of gravitational waves, but also the flow around hypersonic spacecraft, or even the movements of magnetized plasma, hotter than the Sun, to be confined by novel technologies for nuclear fusion reactions.”
She concludes by saying: “However, our ability to exploit the predictive power of such general equations is up to now unsatisfactory, thus, within the ALcHyMiA research project, I want to develop novel advanced structure preserving numerical methods, of high order of accuracy and of Lagrangian type, with in addition provable mathematical properties”. 
“These novel methods will convey superior resolution and reliability to our simulations!” 

A crucial ingredient, in Elena’s research, will be the introduction of groundbreaking direct Arbitrary-Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) methods on moving polyhedral meshes with changing topology. Topology changes are necessary to maintain optimal grid quality when following rotating compact objects, complex shear flows or metric torsion, but their understanding and high order treatment is particularly complex, especially because it involves 4D spacetime manifolds, and thus represents one of our major milestones.

 
Finally, we recall, that, in addition, it is an explicit mission of the ERC ALcHyMiA to grow a solid scientific community, sharing know-how by tailored dissemination activities from top-level schools to international events to be carefully organized in the near future.