James Kneller

Bio

James (Jim) Kneller received his PhD from The Ohio State University (OSU) in 2001 on the subject of Light Element Nucleosynthesis under the supervision of Gary Steigman. After remaining at OSU for a year, he came to NC State in 2002 as a postdoc working with Gail McLaughlin leaving in 2005 to take up another postdoc position at the University of Minnesota. In 2008 he later became a ‘chercheur’ at the French Institut de Physique Nucleaire (IPN), a division of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and then returned to NC State in 2010 as an assistant professor.

 

Area(s) of Expertise

Jim's research in theoretical astrophysics has wandered over his early career from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, the Cosmic Microwave Background and dark energy through to Galactic Chemical Evolution and Cosmic Ray Spallation. But as a postdoc at NC State he began to explore the flavor oscillations of supernova neutrinos and this subject has remained a source of interest for him ever since. The research in his group falls into two broad categories: to understand how neutrinos can change their flavor as the propagate through a supernova due to all the different mechanisms that cause them to mix, and to compute the expected neutrino flux at Earth from all the different kinds of supernovae and examine what we can learn about how the star exploded. The results from his calculations were used to asses the sensitivity of various neutrino detector designs to supernova neutrinos such as DUNE. In 2011 Jim was awarded a Department of Energy's Early Career Research Program.

 

Publications

• Neutrino fast flavor oscillations with moments: Linear stability analysis and application to neutron star mergers , PHYSICAL REVIEW D (2024)
• The SNEWS 2.0 alert software for the coincident detection of neutrinos from core-collapse supernovae , JOURNAL OF INSTRUMENTATION (2024)
• Two-moment Neutrino Flavor Transformation with Applications to the Fast Flavor Instability in Neutron Star Mergers , ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL (2024)
• Fundamental Symmetries, Neutrons, and Neutrinos (FSNN): Whitepaper for the 2023 NSAC Long Range Plan , (2023)
• Neutrino fast flavor instability in three dimensions for a neutron star merger , PHYSICS LETTERS B (2023)
• Advancing the landscape of multimessenger science in the next decade , (2022)
• Collaborative experience between scientific software projects using Agile Scrum development , SOFTWARE-PRACTICE & EXPERIENCE (2022)
• Neutrino flavor mixing with moments , PHYSICAL REVIEW D (2022)
• SNEWPY: A Data Pipeline from Supernova Simulations to Neutrino Signals , ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL (2022)
• SNEWS 2.0: a next-generation supernova early warning system for multi-messenger astronomy , NEW JOURNAL OF PHYSICS (2021)

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