Jim Fuller edited section_Application_Proposing_Team_begin__.tex  almost 9 years ago

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Below we briefly explain 1) the results that the team achieved during/after the program and 2) the follow up work we intend to perform while together at KITP.  \subsection{Introduction}  The team members enjoyed a very productive period of collaboration during the Galactic Archaeology and Precision Stellar Astrophysics program at KITP in 2015. That collaboration led to the production of two papers on red giant seismology, recently submitted to Science and Nature. the first paper discussed the ability to measure magnetic fields in red giant stars using asteroseismology, and the second used this technique to constrain/measure magnetic fields in thousands of red giant stars. We believe this work has paved the way to a new sub-field of stellar astrophysics that is ripe for additional study. Consequently, there are several research topics which we wish to pursue during a follow-up visit to KITP.  \subsection{Project Overview}  The first research topic we intend to investigate is the existence of strong magnetic fields within stars on the red clump. The previous works only analyzed stars ascending the red giant branch, but similar physics will occur for red clump stars burning helium in their cores. However, identifying the asteroseismic signature of strong magnetic fields in clump stars is slightly more difficult because they are difficult to distinguish from ascending red giants. Collaboration between the team members will allow us to work out the details of this process from the observational end, and what can be learned from these observations on the theoretical end.  A second topic of investigation are "Droopy-like" stars that show a particular asteroseismic signature that allows for a more precise measurement of their internal magnetic fields. Thus far, only one star ("Droopy") that shows this signature has been analyzed in detail. However, more Droopy-like stars likely exist. We intend to identify these stars in the data, measure their internal magnetic field strengths, and use them to trace the evolution of internal magnetic field strengths in red giant stars.  Third, we hope to use additional time at KITP to examine the occurrence of magnetic fields in cluster stars. These stars have nearly identical ages and compositions and provide the perfect testbed to understand evolution of magnetic fields in a uniform population of stars. Red giant cluster stars exist in both Kepler data and recent and upcoming K2 fields, so there are many stars in several clusters (of differing ages and metallicities) that can be used to understand the development of magnetic fields in different populations of stars.