Bert Vandenbroucke

I am a Research Software Engineer working for the Astronomical Observatory of Leiden University. My main research interests are (radiation) hydrodynamical integration methods (moving mesh methods, mesh-free methods...) and their application for modelling of star formation on small (star-forming) and large (galactic) scales. I am also trying to understand the origin and properties of the diffuse ionised gas in disc galaxies, using a combination of radiation transfer and radiation hydrodynamics simulations. Currently, I am working on the implementation of polarised dust emission off non-spherical grains in the radiative transfer code skirt

I am the author of the moving-mesh code Shadowfax and the radiation transfer and (moving-mesh) radiation hydrodynamics code CMacIonize. I am also involved in the development of the massively parallel simulation code swift, together with colleagues in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland.

You can find an up-to-date list of my scientific publications using the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) or on my Google Scholar profile. My most recent important publications are:

Polarised emission from aligned dust grains in nearby galaxies: Predictions from the Auriga simulations (arXiv pre-print, journal article)

Vandenbroucke B., Baes M., Camps P., Kapoor A. U., Barrientos D., Bernard J.-P., Astronomy & Astrophysics, 653, A34

CMacIonize 2.0: a novel task-based approach to Monte Carlo radiation transfer (arXiv pre-print, journal article)

Vandenbroucke B., Camps, P., 2020, Astronomy & Astrophysics, 641, A66

CosTuuM: Polarized Thermal Dust Emission by Magnetically Oriented Spheroidal Grains (arXiv pre-print, journal article)

Vandenbroucke B., Baes M., Camps, P., 2020, The Astronomical Journal, 160, 55

Radiation hydrodynamics simulations of the evolution of the diffuse ionized gas in disc galaxies (arXiv pre-print, journal article)

Vandenbroucke B., Wood K., 2019, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 488, 1977

Testing the stability of supersonic ionized Bondi accretion flows with radiation hydrodynamics (arXiv pre-print, journal article)

Vandenbroucke B., Sartorio N. S., Wood K., Lund K., Falceta-Gonçalves D., Haworth T. J., Bonnell I., Keto E., Tootill D., 2019, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 485, 3771

These are the projects I am currently working on:

Shadowfax (source, ascl, code paper)

My own moving mesh code. This free software is written in object-oriented C++ and is available on github.

SWIFT (source, code paper)

Massively parallel task-based N-body hydrodynamical code, developed at the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University. The default version of the code uses an SPH hydrodynamical integrator; I am responsible for an alternative mesh-free hydrodynamical implementation.

CMacIonize (source, ascl, code paper 1, code paper 2)

Monte Carlo photoionization and radiation hydrodynamics code that uses a novel task-based algorithm for Monte Carlo radiation transfer.

CosTuuM (source, code paper)

Python library that generates optical property tables for spheroidal dust grains that can be used in radiative transfer applictions, e.g. the radiative transfer code SKIRT.