X-ray astronomy and fundamental physics

Dr Esra Bulbul currently holds an astrophysicist position at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). She earned her PhD degree in physics from the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center/UAH in 2010. She had postdoctoral research experience at CfA, NASA, and MIT. Dr Bulbul's research lies at the crossroads of astrophysics, cosmology, and particle physics. In particular, it has centered on indirect searches of dark matter particle through its decay or annihilation in the X-ray band. She utilizes X-ray data from XMM-Newton, Chandra, Hitomi, and Suzaku X-ray satellites and radio data from the South Pole Telescope in her research.

Jelle obtained his master's degree in 1981 and his PhD in astronomy at the same university in 1985 with a thesis on Solar Flares.After that he joined SRON, the Netherlands Institute for Space Research in Leiden, first as a postdoc and from 1988 as a permanent staff member. He moved in 1994 with the Leiden branch to Utrecht. He is now senior scientist at SRON, and since 2014 adjunct full professor of high-energy astrophysics at Leiden University. His specialism is high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy of extragalactic sources. He is acting PI of the XMM-Newton Reflection Grating Spectrometer and the Chandra Low Energy Transmission Grating Spectrometer. In addition he has been an ESA-selected member of the Astro-H Science Advisory Council.

Signe Riemer-Sørensen is a postdoc at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo. She obtained her PhD on "X-ray characterisation of dark matter" from the Dark Cosmology Centre in Copenhagen in 2009. Later she held a grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark to measure neutrino masses using the WiggleZ Galaxy Survey while being a postdoc at University of Queensland, Australia. Her research interests range from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, over dark matter signatures, to late time chemical evolution of galaxies, but always with some connection to dark matter or neutrinos.

Tesla is an Associate Professor of Physics at University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her BSc from The College of William and Mary and her PhD in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on observational cosmology and particle astrophysics, including constraints on the nature of dark matter and dark energy and studies of the evolution of galaxies.

Professor Abazajian has been working on X-ray astronomy probes of dark matter since 2001, when he and his colleagues published the first detailed estimates for the sensitivity of X-ray telescopes to dark matter decay, and placed the first limits on dark matter decay via X-ray astronomy. Since then, he has worked with cosmological large scale structure surveys, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, combined with cosmic microwave background data, to test standard cosmology and its extensions. He has also worked on gamma ray searches for dark matter annihilation and decay, employing existing data and forecasts from the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope and ground-based atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes. With the detection of a candidate dark matter line in the X-ray in 2014, Professor Abazajian has worked on the details of sterile neutrino dark matter production in the parameter space of interest, and its implications for galaxy formation.

Stefano Profumo is a Professor of Physics and Chair of Graduate Studies in the Physics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the Deputy Director for Theory of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics. Profumo earned his MS in Physics from Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy, in 2011, and his PhD in Elementary Particle Physics from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA/ISAS) in Trieste, Italy, in 2014. He held research positions at the Florida State University and at the California Institute of Technology prior to joining the faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2007. Profumo is the author or co-author of more than 160 peer-reviewed publications in the areas of Particle Physics Theory, Cosmology, and High-energy Astrophysics; his work has been cited more than 11,000 times according to Google Scholar.

Professor Boyarsky graduated from MIPT in 1995 and got my PhD in 1999. He worked at the Niels Bohr Institute, EPFL (Lausanne), ETH (Zurich) and CERN. Currently he is a professor at Leiden University. He is a theoretical physicist, working in particle and astroparticle physics and cosmology. He is a part of the SHiP collaboration and scientific associate at CERN.

Dr Stefano Ettori is currently “Primo Ricercatore” at INAF Astronomical Observatory in Bologna, where he is staff research scientist since 2004, and Research Associate at INFN Bologna. Since 2013, he is a co-chair of the scientific working group on the “Astrophysics of galaxy groups & clusters” for the ESA Large mission Athena, the next generation X-ray observatory dedicated to the investigation of the Hot & Energetic Universe. 

In the past years, he has been Fellow at ESO, Garching (Germany; 2001-2004) and Research Associate in the X-ray Group at the Institute of Astronomy of the University of Cambridge (UK; 1998-2001), where he has also taken his PhD in Astronomy in 1998. Dr Ettori works on the formation and evolution of Groups and Clusters of Galaxies, focusing his activities on two main topics: the physical properties of the Intra-Cluster Medium from the core to the outskirts where mass accretion is occurring; the use of Galaxy Clusters as cosmological probes through the measurement of their baryonic and dark matter content.

Fran completed her PhD in theoretical physics at Oxford, before moving to DAMTP as a Junior Research Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge. She is interested in particle phenomenology and in using astrophysical observations to search for new fundamental physics. Her PhD research focused on analysing X-ray telescope data to search for astrophysical signatures of axions. She has also explored how recently observed anomalies at 3.5 keV could be explained by new fundamental physics. Fran is interested in the potential of next generation telescopes to search for and constrain axions and other Beyond the Standard Model physics. Outside of research, Fran is an active science communicator and science comedian.

Javier Redondo was born in Zaragoza Spain and graduated in Physics in the University of Zaragoza, Spain, in 2002. Obtained his PhD in Theoretical Physics in the Autonomous University of Barcelona by 01/06/2007 with a thesis titled "Can the PVLAS particle be compatible with the astrophysical bounds?”, that granted the extraordinary PhD prize in the field of Physics that year. He continued his research in the field of low mass particles beyond the standard model of particle physics while hired as postdoctoral fellow in the theory group of the Deutsches Synchrotron (DESY) Hamburg, Germany and the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, both in Germany. He is currently Ramón y Cajal fellow in the University of Zaragoza and continues his research, mostly involved in discovering the elusive QCD axion.

Guenter received his PhD from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1993 with a thesis on non-linear neutrino oscillations. From 1993 until 1999 he was a postdoc at University of Chicago where he started to work on ultra-high energy cosmic rays and various aspects of the early Universe and cosmology such as primordial magnetic fields. In 1999 he moved to Paris for a permanent job as a researcher with the french Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique where he continued studies on astroparticle physics. Finally, in 2007 he became full professor in the II Institute for theoretical physics at the University of Hamburg.