Young Scientist Award of the Physical Society of Japan for Sho Fujibayashi

Postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics honored for his research on neutron star mergers

Every year, the Physical Society of Japan (JPS) presents its Young Scientist Awards to young researchers to recognize outstanding achievements in their early research careers. The prize is awarded to excellent young researchers who promise to make a lasting contribution to the future of physical research in Japan. Sho Fujibayashi will deliver an award lecture at the next annual meeting of the JPS on March 20, 2024.

“I am very pleased with this recognition of my work on neutron star mergers,” says Fujibayashi. “It is a great honor for me to receive one of the prestigious awards of the Physical Society of Japan.” The award recognizes his studies of mass ejection in neutron star mergers using numerical relativistic simulations.

Three of the papers by Sho and his co-authors are now recognized by the award:

• In “Mass Ejection from the Remnant of a Binary Neutron Star Merger: Viscous-radiation Hydrodynamics Study,” published in The Astrophysical Journal in 2018, Fujibayashi et al. performed a long-term general relativistic neutrino radiation hydrodynamics simulation for a massive neutron star surrounded by a torus.
• The paper “Mass ejection from disks surrounding a low-mass black hole: Viscous neutrino-radiation hydrodynamics simulation in full general relativity,” published in Physical Review D in 2020, deals with viscous neutrino-radiation hydrodynamics simulations for accretion disks surrounding a spinning black hole.
• In “Comprehensive study on the mass ejection and nucleosynthesis in binary neutron star mergers,” published in The Astrophysical Journal in 2023, Fujibayashi and his co-authors performed numerical relativistic simulations for binary neutron star mergers that lead to hypermassive neutron stars that then collapse into a black hole.

Sho Fujibayashi received his Ph.D. in physics from Kyoto University in 2018. Since June 2018, he has been a postdoctoral researcher in the Computational Relativistic Astrophysics Department of Masaru Shibata at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in the Potsdam Science Park.

The Young Scientist Award of the Physical Society of Japan was established in 2006 to recognize outstanding young researchers as future leaders in physics. Candidates are nominated independently by a selection committee in each division, and winners are selected by the Board of Directors. The awardees deliver a memorial lecture at the Annual Meeting.