I am no longer at Columbia, having defended my thesis "The flux of ultra high energy cosmic gamma rays observed by the HiRes exeriment" in July 2008. As part of that work I wrote and released the ACME cosmic gamma ray simulation. My career is on hold while I spend a year volunteering with orphans in South Africa.
My work was on the HiRes cosmic ray detector, an experimental astroparticle physics collaboration exploring the extreme high energy spectrum of cosmic rays. What does that mean? Well, we're studying particles entering the atmosphere with tremendous amounts of kinetic energy by looking at the ensuing shower of particles that they produce on contact with the atmosphere. For some images and animations illustrating this, see Hajo Drescher's page.
This is interesting physics since particles have been observed with energies much higher than current theory predicts. We believe that cosmic rays are protons, possibly from outside the galaxy. Protons with energies above 50 EeV are expected to interact with the CMB and thus not travel very far without losing energy (the so-called GZK cut-off). The AGASA collaboration did see events above the GZK energy, thus we would like to know
- Are the AGASA results reproducible with different techniques?
- Is there any preference in the arrival directions of Cosmic Rays?
- Are high energy cosmic rays protons, photons, neutrinos or something else?
I have organized some of the C++ code I have written which may be useful to other C++ programmers, especially astro- and astroparticle physicists.
My web presence has shifted to my blog. In 2009 I am volunteering in South Africa with African Solutions to African Problems and blogging about it.
