Research Interests:
Transient events from compact objects like neutron stars and black holes are an exciting way to study their extreme environments and their underlying physical processes that lead to supernova explosions and gravitational waves. These highly energetic events seen by gamma ray observatories are driven by particle interactions like synchrotron and inverse compton radiation, which accelerate charged particles and emit high energy gamma rays up to TeV energies. I primarily use VERITAS and FermiLAT observatories to study these objects, and have worked on various projects:
- Superluminous Supernovae
- I am testing the possibility that the extreme processes driving the superluminous optical emission from SLSNe may also drive late time TeV emission by analyzing data from VERITAS and Fermi-LAT observatories.
- Gravitational Waves (GW)
- Gravitational waves are disturbances in spacetime triggered by fast star collapses or rapid motions of massive compact objects. I worked on designing and optimizing the real-time alert response software to aid VERITAS observations of gravitational waves triggered by LIGO/VIRGO. LIGO/VIRGO observations release large probability maps of the gravitational wave source position (as large as hundreds of square degrees, compared to a few square degrees visible by VERITAS), so our software determines the observing schedule of various pointings on the sky by optimizing the highest probability regions with local observing criteria (clear sky, telescope pointing direction, moon position, etc). We have followed up on about a dozen events during this season's LIGO/VIRGO run using this software.
- Gamma Ray Bursts (GRB)
- I have followed up on data analysis of the last few years worth of GRB observations by VERITAS. In many cases, due to the rapid nature of the burst, observations are suboptimal and require extensive care to pull out real gamma ray events. We are building a small catalog of observation upper limits and hope to someday catch the full extent of the emission in action.
In order to help these scientific goals, I have also worked on new analysis techniques and hardware for improvements in the future.
- IACT Analysis Techniques - ITM+BDT
- Analysis of raw images from IACTs have generally relied on simple box cuts and other intuitive techniques to select gamma ray events from the data. In this project I am working to help optimize the training outcomes of the combined techniques, Image Template Method (ITM) and BDT, to improve direction and energy reconstruction for low energy events. Transient events like GRBs and GW are likely to emit most of their gamma rays at these lowest energy bins, so this analysis improvement will directly benefit my science goals.
- pSCT Alignment
- Our group has long been a key group in supporting the construction and commission of the prototype Schwarzchild Couder Telescope as part of the CTA-US project. I am working on the software that controls the hardware for the alignment of the segmented mirrors of the pSCT. This software uses Opc-UA for hardware communication, which allows us to coordinate the collection of data from each mirror and their components so that we can align the entire system in a unified way.