Supervisor: Prof. Cristina C. Popescu
Over the past decades my research group at UCLan, in collaboration with the Max-Planck-Institute for nuclear physics in Heidelberg, Germany, has maintained a leading position in the international community in the modelling of the propagation of direct- and dust-reradiated starlight in spiral galaxies. We are seeking now for a PhD student to further advance this field by extending the existing radiative transfer algorithms to incorporate the transport of spectral line emission from neutral and molecular interstellar gas, self-consistent with the transport of starlight. It is envisaged the new extended algorithm will enable the modelling of a wide range of emission data from gas and dust in nearby galaxies obtained using facilities such as ALMA and JWST, with further potential applications in gamma-ray astronomy. Alternatively, we could offer a project that would be more gamma-ray oriented. We would like to extend the capability of our RT code to self-consitently predict gamma-ray emission for star-forming galaxis, including the Milky Way.