I’m working with Professor Maya Fishbach at the Canadian Insitute for Theoretical Astrophysics to improve methodologies in the dark siren method, an effort to use gravitational waves (GWs) to measure the local expansion rate of the Universe, or Hubble constant. Though measuring the Hubble constant only requires two ingredients, distance and redshift, the tension between different measurements has been a subject of intense debate in modern cosmology. GWs are unique cosmological probes because their amplitude directly encodes the distance to their source without the need for a cosmological distance ladder. In the dark siren method, a galaxy catalogue then provides the redshifts for all potential host galaxies in a GW’s localization volume. Using a hierarchical Bayesian framework, the distance and redshift information is used to calculate a posterior on H0. As the number of GW detections increases, this method could alleviate the current tension in the H0 measurement. I’m currently working to quantify the effects of galaxy catalogue incompleteness on our ability to recover the Hubble constant. I seek to characterize the types of catalogs needed for an unbiased dark siren analysis, and in the case of incomplete catalogs, offer prescriptions for completeness corrections that leverage knowledge of large-scale structure.
In the summer of 2022, I participated in the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian Astronomy REU. I worked with Dr.Ryan Cloutier to probe the physical processes shaping the exoplanet “radius valley” - the drop in occurrence around 1.8 Earth Radii of small, close-in exoplanets. Whether this dearth of planets emerges directly from the planet formation process or via subsequent mass loss mechanisms remains an open question. I created a user-friendly Python software program, PEPPER, that tests photoevaporation, core-powered mass loss, and an accretion-limited primordial radius valley model against systems with multiple transiting planets that span the radius valley. Using measurements of the physical and orbital parameters, you can test a planetary system’s consistency with these proposed mechanisms. Check out my recent paper here! You can also check out the talk I gave at the CfA REU symposium or see the poster I presented on this work at the 241st AAS meeting.
From February to July 2023, I was a research intern at CERN and a member of the ATLAS collaboration. I worked with Dr. Valentina Cairo to argue for the introduction of timing-capable detectors, upgrading particle tracking from 3 to 4 dimensions, within the inner tracker of the ATLAS experiment. I used machine learning techniques to quantify the proposed detectors’ improvements in signal-noise discrimination and tested novel permutation invariant network architectures to demonstrate the increased efficiency of bottom quark jet tagging in simulated ATLAS data.
My first research project, supervised by Professor JJ Hermes at Boston University, was to assemble a catalogue of pulsating white dwarf stars, or ZZ-Ceti’s, from the first three years of data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). This catalog would serve future asteroseismologists who could use the 2-20 minute period pulsations to probe deep beneath the surface of these compact stellar remnants. I used the stable photometry provided by TESS to search for pulsations in the time-series data for over 3000 observed white dwarfs. Combining efforts with an international collaboration of astronomers, we published a catalog of 70 new ZZ-Ceti’s, increasing the known sample by 20%. Check out the paper here!