PERSONNEL AND GENERAL NEWS

The SISSA group participating in the Network project currently consists of two faculty members (John Miller and Luciano Rezzolla), one post-doc (Shin Yoshida) and three Ph.D. students (Olindo Zanotti, Luca Baiotti and Pedro Montero). Pedro is our research student funded from the Network and he started in October 2000.

Over the summer, Luciano was in Golm for a month, getting on with work without being bugged by the rest of our group! Shin, Pedro, Luca and John were in South Africa for almost a month, first in Cape Town, where we met up with some old friends and saw something of the surrounding countryside, then in Durban for GR16, then Krugersdorp for the Numerical Relativity workshop, then ten days of vacation, touring in the northern Transvaal and the Kruger Park. We did some very good hill-walking as well as seeing the Big 5 at home in their natural habitat (some great photos of Shin looking like a Samurai on the trail of the lions!).

For the latter part of the summer, John was in Oxford and had a visit from Nils and Ian Jones for a meeting together with Peter Jones (the person responsible for starting off the hyperon ``death of the r-modes'' drama). Peter (a colleague of John's at Oxford) is a nuclear physicist who is just now going into retirement and has a reputation as a somewhat reclusive guru, so it was an achievement to fix up this meeting! Indeed, it was something that John was looking forward to with some trepidation, knowing both Nils and Peter beforehand and seeing a strong possibility that this could end up as an unproductive stand-off (sorry Nils - you know what I mean!). However, in the end it went extremely well and gave some things to think about and work on further.

Back at SISSA, things are picking up again after the summer. Olindo (who was in Italy over the summer) is now going into his final year but still has calculations to do (on accretion flows) before turning attention to the thesis. He is now concentrating on a 2D code kindly provided by Toni and together with Luciano is setting up initial tests of thick tori around a Schwarzschild black hole. Pedro and Luca have finished their first-year exams and, after spending some time getting familiar with Cactus (including a visit to AEI in May), are now ready to go full-time on research. Pedro has been off in Spain for a couple of weeks, attending the Spanish Relativity Meeting and visiting the Valencia group. (We hope he will be collaborating with them on his project to investigate tori around black holes, formed after a binary neutron star coalescence.) Luca is getting his hands dirty with Cactus4 and learning how to avoid the thorns! A new post-doc is about to join us - Arun Thampan from IUCAA in Pune. He has worked on various topics in relativistic astrophysics and we are looking forward to collaborating with him, in particular on problems concerning accretion onto compact objects and properties of neutron stars (magnetic fields, r-modes, etc.)

The following is our scientific report, broken down into subsections. When possible we have highlighted the connections with the other nodes of the network