This project will support a postdoctoral scholar and graduate student?s efforts to develop radiation hydrodynamical simulations of HII region breakouts of primordial protostars. These models will also include the effects of protostellar rotation, WIMP annihilation heating, and disk photo-evaporation, and are needed in order to better understand how the first stars (Population III.1) formed.
This work has broader impacts in that some research results will be integrated into teaching and public outreach activities of the PI. An upper mass limit of the first stars will be an important input for models of early universe chemical evolution as well as galaxy and globular cluster formation.
