Frameworks: MUSES, Modular Unified Solver of the Equation of State

The recent detection of X-rays from hot spots on the surface of rotating neutron stars and the observation of the gravitational waves emitted when neutron stars collide hold the promise of revealing the mysteries of nuclear astrophysical phenomena in a previously inaccessible regime. Meanwhile, in the laboratory, heavy-ion collision experiments, akin to miniature neutron star mergers, can reveal complementary information about the properties of matter at extreme temperatures and densities.

A core group of research teams at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the University of Houston, Kent State University, and several other auxiliary institutions are creating a new cyberinfrastructure that can rapidly and efficiently describe nuclear matter across vastly different densities and temperatures. This open cyberinfrastructure allows users to understand the nature of the building blocks of matter through comparisons with data from NASA’s Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, the National Science Foundation’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, the Department of Energy’s fixed target Solenoid Tracker at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, and other international facilities.

The project provides outreach to the community through an online science portal that makes high-end computations more approachable for end users with additional tutorials, extended showcases, and detailed documentation.

The research plan creates a cyberinfrastructure, MUSES (Modular Unified Solver of the EoS), that provides various scientific communities with novel tools to help answer critical interdisciplinary questions in nuclear astrophysics, gravitational wave astrophysics, and heavy-ion experiments. The investigators are creating modern, efficient and parallelizable code to generate equation-of-state modules in different regimes of density, pressure, and temperature in either 2, 3, or 4 dimensions.

These modules are then integrated into a single, standardized global calculational engine that allows the fast generation of equations-of-state across the entire phase diagram of quantum chromodynamics — the fundamental theory of strong interactions. The project creates a web interface with a collection of application programming interfaces that allows external users to run the MUSES cyberinfrastructure remotely and deploy it in high-performance computing clusters.

In particular, the plug-and-play operability of MUSES allows external users to select parameters in the equation-of-state package to run a given set of modules and generate a global EoS with a chosen set of observable byproducts. This project advances the goals of the Division of Physics and the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure of the National Science Foundation.

This award by the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is jointly supported by the Windows on the Universe NSF Big Idea program, the Physics at the Information Frontier (PIF) program in the Division of Physics (PHY), and the Division of Astronomical Sciences (AST).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.