I am primarily interested in high-energy astrophysics. I am
currently researching Active Galactic Nuclei (
AGN)
accretion disks using X-ray spectroscopy with
NuSTAR and
Suzaku
working with Dr. Laura Brenneman at the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics. The primary goal of this work is characterizing
the properties of AGN accretion disk corona, absorbers, and, if
possible, space-time near the central supermassive black hole for
several X-ray bright AGN. Supermassive black hole spin can be deduced if
highly-broadened reflection features are present in the AGN X-ray
spectrum.
I recently have been researching Blazars, a type of AGN that emits
a high energy jet nearly straight at Earth, with Dr. Alan Marscher and
the Blazar Research Group at Boston University. Blazar's
radiation, which is prominent across the entire electromagnetic
spectrum, exhibits violent variability in brightness. Bright `knots'
appear to move at superluminal speeds down blazar jets, an illusion
caused by the jet orientation combined with near-light flow speeds.
Supermassive black holes are thought to be the `central engines' that
produce the jets. Using Very Long Baseline Interferometry (
VLBI),
a technique that combines radio antennas to create an effective
continent-sized telescope, I made high resolution images of Blazar jets
to study jet structure and the source of photons that get
inverse-Compton scattered up to gamma-rays by electrons in the
jet.
Publications
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Co-Author Papers
"Gamma-Ray Energies in the Decay of 38Cl," K.S. Krane,
M.L.
Keck, E.B. Norman, and A.P. Shivprasad, Applied Radiation and
Isotopes, (2011),
doi:10.1016/j.apradiso.2011.12.033