Axel Brandenburg is working in the field of astrophysical fluid dynamics and has also an interest in selected topics of astrobiology. He is particularly interested in the question of magnetic field generation from turbulent motions with applications to the Sun and stars, accretion discs, galaxies, and the early Universe. His work on accretion disc turbulence was the first to show that the magneto-rotational and dynamo instabilities lead to a sustained doubly-positive feedback. Recently, he contributed to clarifying the long-standing question of the suppression of the dynamo effect in generating large-scale fields. He is also responsible for the maintenance of the Pencil Code, which is a public domain code (https://github.com/pencil-code) for astrophysical fluid dynamics that is well suited for large clusters with distributed memory.
keywords
Solar and stellar activity, early Universe magnetic fields, accretion discs, dynamo theory, turbulence
