Vacation Scholarships at CAS - Applications

Swinburne University Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing (CAS) accepts applications for Vacation Scholarships from university students in the last, or second last, year of your undergraduate degree with excellent scholastic records.

Applications can be made at any time throughout the year.

Applications for Vacation Scholarships from students outside of Australia will be considered.

Scholarships will generally last between 8 and 10 weeks.

The usual eligibility to apply requires the applicant to be undertaking a BSc or similar.

** Prior to any application you should send

• a copy of your official (certified) academic record (with a grading system),
• CV,
• a cover letter (that indicates which research project(s) [below] are related to your research interests and experience),
• a letter of recommendation from a lecturer or supervisor, and
• any other supporting documentation of previous research to:

A limited number of Vacation Scholarships are available each year and these are aimed at the highest quality research students.

Descriptions of Vacation Scholarship research projects

• The Development of Mass-Segregation in Star Clusters Affected by External Potentials.This project will involve performing N-body simulations of star cluster evolution using an existing code. The code has recently been upgraded to include non-uniform external potentials, such as the tidal field of our Galaxy. By including a stellar mass spectrum in the N-body models it will be possible to quantify the rate and extent of mass-segregation in star clusters and how this is affected by the tidal field of the host galaxy. The student will then be able to comment on recent observations of Galactic globular clusters that show a turn-over in the stellar mass function at low-mass, i.e. is this a dynamical effect or is it a remnant of the initial mass function. Understanding this is important for understanding the Galactic environment at the epoch of cluster formation. Supervisors Dr Jarrod Hurley and Dr Chris Power
• Measuring the growth factor of the Universe at z=0.5 from the bispectrum of Luminous Red Galaxies.The clustering of galaxies encodes crucial information about the components of the Universe and the processes through which large-scale structure grows with time. In particular, "higher-order" statistics such as the bispectrum can be used to measure the detailed manner in which galaxies trace the underlying dark matter fluctuations. This project involves an analysis of these clustering patterns in a large catalogue of Luminous Red Galaxies with accurate photometric redshifts at redshift z=0.5. This catalogue constitutes the largest effective cosmic map, and should therefore produce the best existing measure of the "growth factor" of the Universe at z=0.5. Comparing the results to today's z=0 Universe will produce a strong test of the currently-favoured "Lambda Cold Dark Matter" cosmological model. Supervisor Dr Chris Blake
• Physical Chemistry of Protoplanetary Dust Formation.It is known that cooling and coalescence of protoplanetary dust grains are important in the building of planets. In this study, the basic physical chemical aspects of these processes will be established through the use of computational thermodynamics. Numerical calculations will be performed to establish the chemical equilibrium for a number of complex systems defined from infrared studies of the protoplanetary dust in order to determine the validity of thermodynamic modelling to apply chemical equilibrium solutions of protoplanetary dust. Supervisors Dr Sarah Maddison and Prof Geoff Brooks
• Interactive Visualisation as a Tool for Computational Drug Design.Using Swinburne University's virtual reality theatre and locally developed 3D graphics library, S2PLOT, this project will involve the creation of customised 3D software for viewing molecular simulations in 3D. Supervisors: Dr Chris Fluke (Astrophysics & Supercomputing) and A/Prof Feng Wang (Centre for Molecular Simulation). Funded through the Faculty of ICT Dean's Collaborative Grants Scheme. Supervisor Dr. Chris Fluke
• Requirements for Real-Time, Full-Dome Visualisations.This project involves an investigation into the requirements for driving a 6-channel full-dome planetarium system from a small linux cluster, as a prototype for a display system to be used at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Colorado. Funded through the Faculty of ICT Dean's Collaborative Grants Scheme. Supervisors Dr. Chris Fluke and Dr. David Barnes
• The Swinburne Centenary Cosmology Simulations.The Centenary Cosmology Simulations is an ambitious project to simulate the Universe 100 times using the Swinburne "Green Machine" supercomputer. This project will involve the development of a software pipeline to analyse the simulation outputs - a dataset of more than 100 Terabytes! Supervisor Dr. Chris Fluke
• Optimization of an Airglow Filter for the distant Universe. An airglow filter could allow the discovery of very high redshift z>7 star-forming galaxies but is a challenging instrumentation problem. Finding the best design for such a device at a given manufacturing cost is an interesting mathematical problem to be developed further. Supervisor Prof. Karl Glazebrook
• Galaxies at z=6. Project: to make a composite spectrum + photometry of z=6 star-forming galaxies from existing Gemini observations of individual objects. Are the continuum spectra consistent with a normal stellar population? Supervisor Prof. Karl Glazebrook
• Old galaxies. Project: take spectra and photometry of red, elliptical galaxies (1.5 < z < 2) from the Gemini Deep Deep Survey (and K<20) and determine the true age uncertainties using several galaxy evolution models. Supervisor Prof. Karl Glazebrook
• Stellar mass assembly. Construct a galaxy stellar mass function from a K<16 spectroscopic sample of 4000 galaxies and look at evolution over 0 < z < 0.6 and compare with the literature. Supervisor Prof. Karl Glazebrook
• Degeneracy between stellar masses, ages and photometric-redshifts. Many papers in the literature use colors of high-z galaxies to determine these quantities. Project: quantify whether these are truly independent via simulations. Health Warning: may tax supercomputer. Supervisor Prof. Karl Glazebrook
• Searching for variations in the fundamental constants with quasar spectra. The constants of Nature play a central role in our fundamental physical theories but these theories cannot predict the values of the constants we observe. Indeed, this is one hint that our theories may be incomplete and that a more fundamental, "grand unified theory" linking all physical interactions -- gravitational, electromagnetic and nuclear - might exist. Perhaps surprisingly, the absorption lines seen in the spectra of extremely distant quasars offer a fairly clean and precise probe of the values of some fundamental constants early in the Universe's history. Supervisor Dr. Michael T. Murphy
• Searching for highly-relativistic binary pulsars. The arrival of a new supercomputer at CAS allows us to perform new searches of parameter space that have been hitherto impossible. This project will take terabytes of data from past surveys and use acceleration algorithms to search for the most exciting accelerated pulsars in our Galaxy. Supervisors Prof. Matthew Bailes and Dr David Barnes
• Monitoring the next-generation radiotelescopes The forthcoming generation of radiotelescopes pose new and substantial challenges in terms of system monitoring. Information regarding environmental conditions, signal levels, power consumption, processor utilisation, memory use and network traffic needs to be collected, saved in a historical database and displayed in realtime. This project will focus on combining Swinburne University Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures' expertise in network diagnostics with the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing's capabilities in 3-dimensional visualisation to produce a prototype next-generation telescope monitoring system. Target telescopes will include the Low Frequency Demonstrator and Australian SKA Pathfinder telescopes being built in Western Australia. Supervisors Dr David Barnes and Associate Professor Grenville Armitage
• Milky Way Satellites in 3D The project is to identify globular clusters and dwarf satellite galaxies around the Milky Way using a new 3D visualisation tool. The 3D distribution of globular clusters will be examined to see if they can be associated with disrupted dwarf galaxies in the halo of the Milky Way. Supervisor Prof. Duncan Forbes
• Supermassive Black Holes For some years astronomers have known that the centers of giant galaxies, built through the collision and merger of lesser galaxies, appear partially depleted of stars. This absence is thought to be a result of the wrecking ball action of supermassive black holes --- from the progenitor galaxies --- as they sink to the center of the newly formed galaxy. The high-resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope has enabled astronomers to measure the size of these depleted cores. However, two competing methods to quantify the observed radial "light-profiles" have been put forward, but they don't agree. The aim of this project is to implement a third method, checking for agreement with either of the other approaches. Supervisor Dr. Alister Graham

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