Opportunities
for New Graduate Students
Rotation and permanent research positions are available. You are
welcomed to contact the group leader Prof. Elliott Bloom or
graduate students (Daniel Engovatov, Michael Hicks,
Pablo Saz Parkinson, Kaice Reilly) if you have any
questions.
USA
Group K built, calibrated and tested the collimators, designed and constructed the
mechanical support structure and contributed to the ground testing and calibration of the
instrument for the Unconventional
Stellar Aspect (USA) X-ray proportional counter based experiment, which was launched February 23, 1999 on the Air Force
Argos Satellite. The determination
and modeling of the detector dead-time, the space-based instrument calibration and the
scientific analysis of much of the resulting high-resolution timing data on black holes
and neutron stars are other responsibilities that are engaging Group K graduate students.
For more information about the pre-launch USA effort, see Han Wen’s Stanford Ph. D.
Thesis, SLAC R-514 (1997).
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RXTE
Several graduate students in Group K have worked on data obtained through the Guest
Observer program on NASA’s RXTE satellite. Ganya Shabad
has been working with members of Dr. Jean Swank's PCA team to understand details
of the RXTE deadtime corrections for cross-calibration with USA. RXTE was launched in 1995
and has been concentrated on obtaining high time resolution data from black holes and
neutron stars in binary systems. A paper analyzing the high-time resolution data from RXTE
and HEAO A-1 on the black hole candidate Cyg X-1 has recently been submitted to the
Astrophysical Journal about some of this work. It is available through: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/9901131
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GLAST
The largest current effort underway in Group K is preparation for the new Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) mission.
Group K scientists are involved in all phases of the GLAST mission including detector and
electronics development, mechanical and thermal engineering studies, and scientific
definition. Many opportunities exist for new students to work on this project, currently
scheduled to be launched in 2005.
GLAST will open up new frontiers in high-energy gamma-ray astronomy, as it has
sensitivity more than 30 times greater and source localization accuracy about 10 times
better than its predecessor, the CGRO/EGRET
experiment. GLAST is expected to study over 1000 blazars, active-galaxies with
relativistic jets emanating from super-massive black holes that emit violently variable
high-energy gamma-radiation. It may also be able to detect evidence for supersymmetric
particle annihilation in the galaxy, and to study the mysterious gamma-ray bursters at
high-energies.
For more information about the involvement of Group K and other Stanford collaborators
in GLAST, see: http://www-glast.stanford.edu
For information on GLAST in general, see: http://www-glast.sonoma.edu
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