Areas of Research
My main field of research is three-dimensional radiative transfer, i.e., the
calculation of light curves and spectra of systems that do not have special
symmetries, like stars, which reduce the problem to one of one spatial
dimension. It was part of my Ph.D. thesis to write programs that solve this
problem on the single instruction multiple data (SIMD) parallel computer
MasPar MP-1,
which contains 8192 or 16384 processors depending on its configuration.
These codes can be applied to a variety of problems. For one, I have used these
codes in order to calculate the 21 cm line profiles of
galaxies and how the appearance of a galaxy changes as one views it from
different directions. This work was done in collaboration with Joel
Tohline, Howard Cohl and Kimberly New. We have incorporated the main results
of this work in a video of a flyby around a galaxy. In
addition, I have investigated cyclotron emission from magnetic cataclysmic
variables together with Juhan
Frank and Ganesh Chanmugam. Thereby, I have also examined the properties of
cyclotron emission of a plasma at high temperatures. It is this latter area of
magnetic cataclysmic variables in which I am currently most active. For this
work, I have ported the necessary codes onto the single program multiple data
(SPMD) computer
Cray T3D.
Recently, I started to work together with Detlev
Koester on the field of variable white dwarfs. Aim of this work is to model
the time-resolved spectra of those stars and to consistently include non-linear
effects. In this field we collaborate with S. O. Kepler and E. L. Robinson, who
provided us with time-resolved
spectra of the star G 226-29 obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope.
Other sites of interest
Institut
für Astronomie und Astrophysik der Universität, Kiel
Department of Physics and
Atronomy, Louisiana State University