- What brought you to RoCS and Norway?
- Since the beginning of my solar (physics) adventure, I have been reading quite a few papers from RoCS, and have been impressed.
Around one year ago, I saw that a postdoc position was available at RoCS.
I thought: maybe I would not get it but this is the kind of opportunity for which I have to try my best. Luckily enough, I’m here now.
When applying, I did not really pay attention to the location, but I visited Norway for several days in 2021 and I knew that Norway has the most magnificent nature (agree to disagree). So when I got the offer, I started to feel excited about living in Norway in the coming years.
Fan Zhang started working at RoCS 1st of August 2023.
Education background
- I obtained my B.E. degree in Electro-Information Engineering from Harbin Engineering University. The study was essentially about designing sonar, but somehow I became interested in numerical simulations. Then, I obtained my M.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Dalian University of Technology, located in a coastal city “near” Korea, and both projects were related to aerospace engineering.
Fortunately, I stayed focused on implementing and developing numerical methods, which turned out to be a valuable experience for doing other research, including solar physics.
Building a career
- Where have you worked before and in what field?
- Before coming to Europe I had only lived in one country, China. Back then, I worked on numerical methods for solving compressible aerodynamics, or mathematically, hyperbolic partial differential equations. In general, the goal was to make numerical modeling of complex shock waves more robust, accurate, and efficient.
However, at some point, I started to hope my work could be more relevant for civil purposes, and I am always excited about studying more complex physics. So finally I decided to look for positions in MHD modeling.
In 2019, I left China and joined Prof. S. Poedts’ group at KU Leuven, Belgium. Being in that vibrant and supportive group, I managed to use my expertise to improve the accuracy and speed of MHD modeling of the solar atmosphere, which is a crucial component for space weather forecasting.
The code (COCONUT) that we have been developing is now really promising since it is much faster than typical explicit solvers and getting more and more accurate for modeling the global solar atmosphere.
Nevertheless, there are still some important physical mechanisms missing in current space weather modeling. Especially, the low solar atmosphere is still largely simplified to make the modeling fast enough to be “forecasting”. So
I’m very curious to know more about the low solar atmosphere, and the (non)connection between phenomena in the low solar atmosphere and the heliosphere.
RoCS is certainly one of the best places in the world where my curiosity may be answered, and I feel lucky to be here.
Staying curious
- What are you going to study?
- One thing I love about doing research is that almost none of my research plans have gone as planned. But yes, I still plan to focus on two challenges:
1) To make space weather modeling faster and more accurate at the same time, and 2) To further understand heating mechanisms in the solar atmosphere, especially the chromosphere.
While being seemly different, these two challenges are actually closely related.
It is impossible to improve the numerical modeling without understanding the physics sufficiently, and as the Sun is the star closest to Earth, it is certainly interesting to know how the complex phenomena happening on the Sun would finally affect our Earth.
To be more specific, recently we have seen a promising advancement (not made by me) that is a very good example to show the relation between these two challenges: based on data from Bifrost simulations, more accurate correlations can be given for the plasma quantities in the solar atmosphere, and by using these correlations, COCONUT model provides, e.g., more accurate solar wind speeds, which are important for space weather modeling.
- How do you plan to answer to the main question?
- My work will be mostly numerical, such as running simulations and coding numerical methods. With the powerful codes in RoCS, numerical simulations will show us more and more information about phenomena on the Sun, and I certainly would like to take advantage of this strength.
I have to mention that I got really fascinated by the novel DISPATCH framework, which has some numerical features that are even better than what I “dreamed”.
In addition, I would like to exploit available data from both simulations and observations, and apparently, there is a lot of potential.
For example, I have been very interested in data-driven reduced-order models. Utilizing the treasurable data available in or accessible from RoCS, data-driven reduced-order models may be constructed and then combined with full-order MHD models to reach a balance between accuracy and efficiency.
In Chinese, we say “You do not get chubby with one bite”.
Having all these expectations in mind, at the moment I’m just testing a simple numerical formula for MHD simulations, trying to solve smaller problems one at a time.
Surrounded by experts
- How can you describe your experience so far?
- It is absolutely enjoyable, in many ways. I believe that chatting with or listening to experts is the best way to learn and, more importantly, be inspired. In the past months, I have had various opportunities to listen to the experts in RoCS talking about their research and the stories behind the research – imagine if a music fan gets to work at the best studio.
Also, the atmosphere in RoCS is very open and relaxing, and I have got a lot of help, even before day 1.
- What do you expect from this experience?
- The expertise that RoCS has is amazing, and the advice and discussions I have had in RoCS are already beyond my expectations. So I think there is a good chance that I can make some progress in what I want to do.
In addition, I am also curious to see how far I can go towards becoming an independent researcher. I hope I can do something that is, to some extent, new, as I have had a lot of freedom from setting up my career development plan to doing research, and I’m ready to see challenges and failures on this journey.
- What do you like to do in your spare time?
- To be honest, I’m quite lazy. So I don’t do much even though I am interested in many things. Among them, my favorites are history, beer, and books. To enjoy the winter, I have found a place where I can resume Kyokushin Karate practice, and I certainly will try cross-country skiing.
