LACEGAL

LACEGAL is the Latin American Chinese European GALaxy Formation network. LACEGAL is supported by the European Commission's Framework 7 Program through the Marie Curie Action International Research Staff Exchange Scheme.

The focus in cosmology is shifting from the determination of the basic cosmological parameters to developing an understanding of how galaxies formed. Progress in this field has been driven by a combination of computer simulation and observational breakthroughs. Over the next few years, groundbreaking new facilities will come online and will provide data of unprecedented quality with which to test theoretical models. The key objective of our proposal is to allow European scientists to play a leading role in advancing our understanding of galaxy formation, by forging new links and research collaborations with scientists in Latin America and China, which host some of these new experiments. Our research programme covers all aspects of numerical galaxy formation. In addition to building new research capacity, we will organise a series of events to avoid fragmentation of research expertise and to help train a new generation of galaxy formation modellers.

The LACEGAL network brings together internationally recognised experts in the theory of galaxy formation and the modelling of the growth of cosmic structure. The network will allow new research collaborations to be made between the main groups working in the subject in Latin America and China, and the principal centres in computational galaxy formation and astrophysics in Europe. Over the duration of the proposed network, several major new observational facilities will start taking survey data which are based in network third country partners: 1) The Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT; Mexico); 2) The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA; Chile); 3) The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fibre Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST; China); 4) The Dark Energy Survey (DES; Chile). Through LACEGAL, European scientists will be able to build partnerships with scientists working on these exciting new projects.