Associate Professor of Astrophysics, University of Helsinki

Bio

I am a computational astrophysicist based in New York. My research is focused on understanding high-energy astrophysical phenomena around neutron stars and black holes.

Currently, I am an Associate Research Scientist in Columbia University (2023, New York, USA). I will start as an Associate Professor of Astrophysics at the Helsinki University in May 2024.

Previously, I was a joint Flatiron Research Fellow in Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute & Postdoctoral Reseacher in Columbia University (2020-2023; New York, USA). Before coming to New York, I was a Nordita Fellow in Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (2018-2020; Stockholm, Sweden).

High-Impact Publications

Another view into my research track can be gained by looking at my high-impact publications:

In addition, my research has been featured in the cover of Physical Review Letters a few times:

prl1 prl2

Selected Publications

A list of some of the papers of mine that I like the most (in no particular order):

  • Radiative turbulent flares in magnetically-dominated plasmas
    • Detailed study on reconnection-mediated turbulent flares and their radiative properties. These flares can be relevant for explaining plasma energization in neutron star magnetospheres and black hole accretion disks.
  • Radiation from rapidly rotating oblate neutron stars
    • Extensive study on radiation characteristics from rapidly spinning neutron stars. We generalize previous works to include effects from oblate surfaces and quadrupole corrections to the spacetime metric.
  • Evidence for quark matter cores inside neutron stars
    • We show that when results from modern nuclear physics and perturbative QCD limits are combined together, they imply that the most massive neutron stars can have quark matter cores. Importantly, we show that even if there is no quark matter, the core is still made of exotic material that breaks the conformal limit (speed of sound exceeds square root of c/3).
  • Neutron star M-R measurements from atmospheric model fits to X-ray burst cooling tail spectra
    • By using a detailed Bayesian fitting procedure we show that it is possible to measure the neutron star radius very accurately from existing X-ray data. From this analysis we obtained a neutron star radius of 12.4 +- 0.4 km that is amazingly consistent with other measurements, and is still one of the most accurate measurements of NS radius.

All Publications Sorted by the Research Topic

In general, you can categorize my past work to (roughly) these topics:

Astroplasma physics

Exoplanet atmosphere dynamics

Equation of state of ultra-dense matter

General relativity/ray tracing

Neutron star (astro)physics

Machine learning

X-ray bursts from neutron stars