GALDISK · The Role of Secular Physical Processes in the Formation and Evolution of Disk Galaxies

lthough strongly interacting and merging galaxies appear to produce the most spectacularand powerful events, they only represent a few percent of all galaxies that we see today. Consequently, a detailed understanding of the internal evolutionary processes (or secular processes) occurring in isolated or weakly interacting galaxies remains essential to account for most of observations, including the Hubble sequence. Numerical simulations have concentrated on the reproduction of the morphological features and kinematical patterns, but very few have modeled the star formation history and chemical evolution of the disk galaxies with bars. The main reason why previous numerical simulations have not concentrated in reproducing the stellar chemical features has been the simple fact that appropriate observational data has not been available.During the course of the next 3 years, I will derive star formation histories for the disk, bars, and bulges of a sample of galaxies with different spectral types. I will directly confront these data with High Performance Computational (HPC) simulations which include star formation and chemical evolution.