ICTS faculty member Pallavi Bhat, along with seven international collaborators, has received a Simons Foundation grant for a Targeted Simons Research Group on Cosmic Magnetism.
The collaboration, led by Glennys Farrar, brings together theorists and observers from institutions across the US, Europe, and India. These highly selective and competitive targeted research grants support high-risk theoretical research in mathematics, physics, and computer science that demonstrates exceptional scientific promise and importance.
The research group will receive USD 1.5 million over three years. Prof. Bhat’s share of the grant will support the recruitment of two Simons postdoctoral fellows at ICTS and facilitate collaborative research activities.
Under this program, Prof. Bhat’s research will develop plasma-physical models to predict the strength and coherence of magnetic fields across cosmic time. Cosmic magnetic fields are entering a transformative era of study. They are becoming observationally accessible, through Faraday rotation surveys such as POSSUM, gamma-ray constraints on void fields, and future facilities such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). Also, cosmological simulations are beginning to include magnetic fields and cosmic rays. This project will investigate how primordial fields evolve through reconnection-driven turbulent decay in the early Universe and how structure formation accelerates dynamo amplification. By combining plasma theory with high-resolution magnetohydrodynamic simulations, the project aims to help build physically motivated initial conditions and sub-grid models for cosmological simulations of magnetic-field evolution, towards understanding cosmic magnetism.
Centre Director Rajesh Gopakumar said, “On behalf of everyone at ICTS, warm congratulations to Pallavi for this boost to her research and for bringing this recognition to ICTS. We can all take pride in it as Pallavi keeps the ICTS flag flying high on the global scene through her future work and through her students and postdocs.”