ERC Starting Grant for neutrino research awarded to Dr. Zewei Xiong
05.09.2024 |
Dr. Zewei Xiong has received a prestigious ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). The funding is one of Europe's most important research awards, aimed at talented young scientists at an early career stage to show their potential as a research leader. Dr. Zewei Xiong is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Nuclear Astrophysics and Structure Department at the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung.
Zewei Xiong’s research centers on neutrino physics and nuclear astrophysics covering a broad range of subjects related to the evolution and nucleosynthesis in supernovae and neutron-star mergers. His work involves theoretical modelling of the quantum dynamics of neutrinos and hydrodynamical simulations of astrophysical events where neutrino interactions play a significant role.
He is one of a few hundred researchers all over Europe to be honored with an ERC Starting Grant this year. His project “Neutrino flavor Transformations in dense Astrophysical Environments” NeuTrAE is aimed to advance our understanding on lingering puzzles regarding the flavor evolution of neutrinos and their implication in particle and nuclear astrophysics. Neutrinos are characterized by their flavors, which can change during propagation – a phenomenon known as neutrino flavor oscillation.
The oscillations in vacuum and ordinary matter are well understood and confirmed by several experiments. Extreme astrophysical events, such as core-collapse supernovae and the violent merger event of two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole, are profuse sources of neutrinos. In those astrophysical environments, the neutrino flux becomes so intense that the flavor interference of neutrinos with each other must be taken into account. This nonlinear effect coupling neutrinos propagating in different directions and with different energies is known as collective neutrino oscillations.
Accounting for the collective neutrino oscillations in simulations of astrophysical environments requires a quantum kinetic transport. It remains a tremendous challenge due to the high dimensionality of the problem and the vastly different scales for flavor and hydrodynamical evolution. The impact of neutrino flavor transitions on those compact objects remains elusive without efficient and sophisticated treatments.
“My thanks go to the European Research Council. I am extremely pleased about this award and the great opportunity it provides for my research goals. I am looking forward to realize NeuTrAE together with my team“, says Zewei Xiong. “With the project NeuTrAE I want to provide a pipeline to study the impact of collective neutrino oscillations in astrophysical environments. NeuTrAE aims to significantly advance our understanding of dynamical evolution of compact astrophysical objects and their nucleosynthesis.”
Zewei Xiong studied Physics at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University and initially worked from 2016 to 2020 as a Teaching Assistant, then as a Research Assistant at the University of Minnesota. There, he received his PhD from the Department of Physics and Astronomy in 2020 and has been working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Theory Department at GSI. (BP)
ERC Starting Grant
ERC Starting Grants for talented early career scientists support outstanding researchers, two to seven years after their PhD, showing great promise and an excellent research proposal under the EU's Horizon Europe research and innovation program. The grants, worth an average of 1.5 million euros, will help ambitious scientists launch their own projects, form their teams of postdoctoral researchers and PhD students and pursue their research ideas. GSI and FAIR researchers have been very successful in recent years in receiving ERC grants, both in the areas of Starting and Consolidator Grants as well as Advanced Grants for established researchers and their highly innovative projects.
