Unleashing the predictive power
of tidal disruption events

The tidal force from a supermassive black hole can disrupt a star passing too close, resulting in a powerful electromagnetic flare as the stellar debris fuels the compact object. Such tidal disruption events provide a unique window into the otherwise hidden population of quiescent supermassive black holes and can offer clues to the mystery of their formation mechanism in the early Universe. With the advent of the Rubin Observatory, we are entering an observational golden era with thousands of events expected to be discovered, increasing our current sample by two orders of magnitude. Fully exploiting this potential requires a robust theoretical framework that characterises the observational signatures produced and links them to the properties of the black hole and disrupted star. I will present progress toward this goal, which relies on a suite of interlinked simulations to follow the entire evolution of tidal disruption events and predict their electromagnetic emission