Rationale
My research activity is focused on the theoretical description of dense matter systems such as atomic nuclei, neutron stars, supernovae and kilonovae. The knowledge in this field highly depends on the possibility to extract tight constraints from nuclear physics experiments on Earth as well as from the observation of stars and transient phenomena. It requires the development of new modeling and analysis of experimental (accelerator) and observational data (gravitational waves, radio, visible an X emissions).
One of my main tool is the nuclear many-body theory, and various version of it, including or not relativity, as well as different levels of phenomenology. I am the author of a semi-agnostic approach, called EOS meta-model, which encodes the nuclear equation of state in terms of the nuclear empirical parameters (Ksat, Lsym, Ksym, etc...). It allows direct analyses of the impact of improved experimental knowledge on compact star properties, as well as easy implementation into Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) and Bayesian statistical tools.
Another important tool is hydro-dynamical simulation of transient phenomena, such as kilonova and supernova, which is the crucial key to connect dense matter properties to astrophysical observations such as gravitational waves or electromagnetic counter-parts. There, both static (equation of state) and dynamic (electro-weak reactions, transport coefficients) micro-physics play an important role.
The crust of neutron stars is another subject of my interest. It is formed of a Coulomb lattice of nuclei embedded in the superfluid neutron gas. To describe its properties, I am applying the finite temperature Bogoliubov approach adapted to band theory. Most of the information from the core transit into the crust, it is thus an important key to access the neutron star core properties.
Keywords:
Neutron stars, core-collapse supernovae, kilovonae, pulsars, gravitational waves, x-ray bursts, neutron tar cooling, giant glitches, superfluidity, pairing re-entrance, quantum many-body theory for finite nuclei, exotic nuclei, bubble nuclei, hyper-exotic nuclei.
Main tools:
Density Functional Theory, nuclear meta-modeling, BCS and Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov theories, mean field (with Skyrme, Gogny, M3Y, and relativistic Lagrangians), RPA, band theory, semi-classical Extended Thomas-Fermi, effects of finite temperature, statistical description of hot nuclei, Bayesian statistics.