Workshop in honor of Dr. Oskar Steiner

Many things can be said about physicists, but they cannot be accused of a lack of self-irony or disinterest in pop culture. This was demonstrated by researchers from the Aldo and Cele Daccò Solar Research Institute (IRSOL) and their colleagues collaborating with IRSOL on Friday 13 and Saturday 14 June in Muralto, in a workshop dedicated to Dr. Oskar Steiner, leader of the group working on MHD numerical simulations of the solar and stellar atmospheres. Right from the title, the workshop played with an acronym: “Pathways to and from the Sun with OSKAR (Outstanding Simulations based on Knowledge, Algorithms, and Research)”. Other amusing acronyms were seen during the presentations, which ranged from in-depth research in solar physics to applications in teaching physics related to everyday life, for example, with a cup of coffee. Of course, the workshop also provided an opportunity to present current research at IRSOL and to offer some reflections on the borderline between science and philosophy, in the final seminar by director Prof. Dr. Svetlana Berdyugina. But physicists do not live by physics alone, so there was no shortage of convivial moments to celebrate Oskar Steiner, who left an important mark on research into our star.

Scientific Program

Oskar Steiner graduated in theoretical physics in 1985 at ETH-Zürich. Before that, he earned a degree in mechanical engineering from the Lucerne School of Engineering. He started his PhD thesis in 1986 at the High Altitude Observatory (HAO) in Boulder, Colorado, and earned his PhD in natural sciences at ETH in 1990. From 1991-1995 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Kiepenheuer-Institut für Sonnenphysik (KIS), where he conducted the first two-dimensional high-resolution simulations of the interaction between magnetic fields and convective flow in the solar atmosphere. He was a visiting scientist at HAO from 1996 to 1997, then returned to KIS in 1998. In 2009, he held a position as a visiting professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) in Tokyo. His areas of expertise include the magnetism of the Sun, the numerical simulation of magnetohydrodynamic processes on the Sun and other stars, including comparison with corresponding observations, and, numerical methods in computational fluid dynamics and radiative transfer. He is the author or co-author of about 170 scientific publications, which have garnered around 3,600 citations. Since 2014, Oskar Steiner has been leading the MHD simulation group at IRSOL.