My PhD focuses on the behaviour of internal gravity waves within stars, including if and how they mix material, how they react to the star ageing, and how best to capture them in numerical simulations.

Internal gravity waves are present in every main-sequence star. Convective regions of the star (like the outer ~30% of the Sun, or the cores of more massive stars) constantly excite waves in the adjacent stable regions. The waves propagate, experience damping, form standing waves, and interact with one another.

To study internal gravity waves in stars, we run two- and three-dimensional simulations of (almost) full stellar interiors, small idealised boxes, and models in between.

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Morton et al. (2025) details the start of our work on chemical mixing by waves in stars. The rate at which material is mixed in and out of the nuclear burning core of a star is cruicial to its evolution, and the contribution of internal gravity waves to this mixing is still not understood physically, or constrained quantitatively.