Petri Käpylä Awarded ERC Advanced Grant
Freiburg, 08/07/2025
PD Dr. Petri Käpylä, lecturer at the University of Freiburg’s Institute of Physics, has received a grant worth 2.5 million euros from the European Research Council for his work at the Institute of Solar Physics (KIS) in Freiburg. In the ‘NeoCon’ project, Käpylä is focusing on convection, the fluid motions in the outer parts of the Sun. The project aims at developing a solar observation-inspired subgrid-scale model that incorporates the effects of surface cooling in global simulations, thus enabling researchers to obtain realistic models of stars.
Vigorous fluid motions transport the energy in the outer parts of the Sun. These motions, more commonly referred to as convection, are the ultimate source of the solar cycle and magnetic activity of stars. Furthermore, convection occurs in some evolutionary phase of practically all stars. Understanding convection is therefore of utmost importance for much of astrophysics. In the past decade and a half, it has become apparent that our understanding of solar and stellar convection is much poorer than previously thought. The NeoCon (‘New Paradigm of Stellar Convection’) project posits that the reason for these difficulties is that current models do not capture the true nature of convection in stars such as the Sun.
The project aims at developing a solar observation-inspired subgrid-scale model that incorporates the effects of surface cooling in global simulations, thus enabling researchers to obtain realistic models of stars. PD Dr. Petri Käpylä will receive 2.5 million euros to realize this project at the Institute of Solar Physics (KIS) in Freiburg. Käpylä has served as head of the ‘Solar-Stellar Connections’ department at KIS since 2023 and is a lecturer at the University of Freiburg’s Institute of Physics, which awarded him his habilitation in early 2025 on the basis of the thesis Ab initio Simulations of Stellar Convection and Dynamos.