Martin Luepker

Affiliated Scientist

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis, where I study collisionless plasma dynamics in the strong gravity environment of spinning black holes. My research focuses on connecting kinetic microphysics, including instabilities, particle heating, and nonthermal acceleration, to the large scale structure and emission of black hole accretion flows and magnetospheres. I use a combination of theoretical analysis and large scale numerical simulations, with an emphasis on general relativistic particle-in-cell (GRPIC) methods.

In recent work, I identified a finite angular momentum kinetic equilibrium in Kerr spacetime, enabling the first stable collisionless torus initial conditions for fully kinetic simulations of black hole accretion. This makes it possible to study MRI driven accretion in the collisionless regime with GRPIC and to directly compare kinetic and GRMHD disk evolution in systems such as Sgr A* and M87*.

I am grateful to be part of the Simons Collaboration and excited to contribute to understanding the extreme plasma physics of black holes.