Astrochemistry
An essential ingredient for accurately modelling the dynamics of star forming regions is the knowledge about the thermal evolution. As the thermal state of the ISM on all scales is tightly coupled to the chemical state, knowledge about the chemical evolution is inevitably necessary in state-of-the-art MHD simulations.
An essential point of the research done in our group is focussed on modelling the chemical evolution of the ISM from galactic down to protostellar scales, which we accomplish by including modern astrochemical networks in our simulations. In detail, our reseach on astrochemistry contains
- the investigation of numerical requirements for accurate chemical and thermodynamical modelling
- the coupling of (radiative) feedback and chemistry as e.g. in HII regions around massive stars
- implementing, extending, testing and applying of astrochemical networks in astrophysical simulations codes.