Hayk Hakobyan, Ph.D.

Hayk Hakobyan is interested in fundamental plasma-physical processes in the magnetospheres surrounding compact objects, such as neutron stars and black holes, as well as other astrophysical environments. In the most extreme conditions in our Universe, the dynamics of plasmas are largely governed by quantum electrodynamic (QED) processes that couple charged particles with the emitted light. To study these phenomena, he uses first-principles plasma simulations using particle-in-cell (PIC) algorithms. Hayk is the developer of two state-of-the-art PIC codes for modeling these processes: Tristan v2 — the first to include QED into the picture, and Entity — the first general-coordinate PIC code, which also runs on GPUs.