Thinh Nguyen (Thịnh Nguyễn)

Currently, I am working on two research projects:

• Investigating the Effect of Galaxy Mergers on Star Formation and Morphology through the Viewpoint of Different Simulation Codes in the AGORA Simulation Suite. AGORA is an international collaboration working on a well-calibrated set of eight major cosmological simulation codes (ENZO, GADGET-3, AREPO, RAMSES, ART, GIZMO, GEAR, and CHANGA). This dataset allows a robust comparison between our current simulation codes, helping us examine our current feedback models and thus enhancing the predictive power of simulations. Because mergers are intricate processes that are highly sensitive to many properties of the progenitor galaxies, they serve as a useful setting to evaluate our present theoretical models.
• Effect of molecular hydrogen self-shielding modeling on galaxy evolution. Even though molecular hydrogen is a crucial ingredient in star formation, modeling their behavior is a computationally heavy task and thus approximation is often used in simulations. However, approximation, while saving time, comes with a cost of accuracy. By comparing with the accurate ray-tracing method, this project examines whether the optically-thin approximation of the molecular hydrogen self-shielding effect leads to significantly different results when simulating galaxy formation.