Recent projects (selected)
Neutron star giant pulses (2025-active)
Some pulsars – the Crab pulsar for example – are known to emit regular, non-period “giant pulses” which span from radio to x-ray wavelengths. However, the driving mechanism remains unknown. I am using Green Bank Telescope observations in an effort to determine whether these emissions can be explained by a megentic reconnection driven relativistic blob of plasma.
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Dark matter observation simulation (2024-2025)
Despite making up the majority of our universe’s matter content, the nature of dark matter (DM) remains elusive. An intriguing macroscopic candidate – known as axion quark nuggets (AQNs) – simultaneously resolve the DM problem, offer a natural explanation for the quantity of regular and dark matter being of the same order of magnitude, and resolve the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem. Through simulation I demonstrated that modern space telescopes (JWST and Euclid) are sufficiently sensitive to image faint emission signals from AQNs opening an avenue for DM detection.
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LIGO signal identification (2023)
The LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA (LVK) gravitational wave (GW) detectors are some of the most sensitve detectors ever constructed. As such transient noise referred to as “glitches” are common and can be confused with actual GW signals. I applied machine learning and dimensional reduction techniques to identigy gaps in the LVK signal processing framework to better distinguish between GW detections and glitches.
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Aspherical supernovae (2022)
The vast majority of supernova theory revolves around spherically symmetric explosions, but there are numerous reasons why a star might explode aspherically. Using hydrodynamic simulation, I investigated how in an aspherical supernova, ejecta from one pole can wrap around the star and collide with ejecta from the other pole at the equatorial plane. I showed that provided with the right stellar parameters, this circumstellar collision may be visible in certain supernovae. I proposed that this mecahnism could explain SN2008D. Published in MNRAS.
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