About

Chi-kwan Chan received his PhD in 2007 from the University of Arizona on computational astrophysics. He was an Institute for Theory and Computation Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Before moving to Nordita in 2010, he took a summer off and biked across America.

Chi-kwan is interested in black hole accretion disks, especially on understanding their variability in order to test general relativity in the strong field regime. His earlier works include developing numerical algorithms to simulate accretion disks around stellar mass black holes. He showed that overstability can lead to low-frequency quasi-periodic oscillations. He also studied the supermassive black hole at the Galactic center and demonstrated that just magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence is not enough to produce the observed flares.

To archive more realistic simulations, Chi-kwan focuses on MHD turbulence and radiation hydrodynamics recently. He is working on a new spectral Galerkin code, SILA, to study and measure transport coefficients in magnetorotational instability-driven turbulence. These transport coefficients will be used in global simulations in order to capture the (usually neglected) sub-grid physics. He also derived a new class of moment methods to make self-consistent radiation hydrodynamic calculations possible. These moment methods will be used to study radiation dominated accretion flows, which will help us to understand the growth of supermassive black holes.