Petrosian Group Home Page

The People

Vahé Petrosian (ADS, astro-ph) Professor
Theoretical astrophysics with concentration on high energy astrophysical processes and cosmology; solar flares, neutron stars, gamma-ray bursts and the accretion disk of stellar and active galactic black holes; early phase of the universe, the evolution of galaxies and quasars, arcs in clusters of galaxies, and gravitational lensing.

Dana Volponi Group Secretary

Current Group

Post-Doctoral Fellows

• Fatima Rubio da Costa
• Frederic Effenberger

Visiting Scholars

• Maria Dainotti

Graduate Students

• Alice Allafort

UNDERGRADUATES

• Gabriel Ehrlich
• Byungwoo Kang

Previous Group Members

Former Post-Doctoral Fellows

• Siming Liu
• Nicole Lloyd, Postdoctoral Fellow, now at LANL
  Gamma-ray bursts. Ph.D. January, 2001.

Former Visiting Scholars

• Hyesung Kang
• Felix Ryde 

Former Graduate Students

• Qingrong Chen
• Michael Dorris
• Yanwei Jiang
• Wei Liu
• Robert Pelzman
• Julia Pryadko, Ph.D. June 1998,
  Wave-particle interactions in plasma physics as a particle acceleration mechanism.
• Dave Saraniti, Ph.D. Jan. 1997,
  Gravitational lens modelling and X-ray gases in galactic clusters as dark matter probes.
• Walid Azzam, Ph.D. June 1996,
  Cosmological modelling of gamma-ray bursts.
• Ted Lee, Ph.D. March 1996,
  Solar flare energetics and coronal heating, gamma-ray burst distributions.
• Brian Park, Ph.D. Sept. 1996,
  Stochastic acceleration of particles and its application to solar flares.

Former Undergraduate Students

• Joel Hartman
• Kevin Luli
• Matt McQuinn
• Ellie Kitanidis: Senior Thesis 
• Timothy Q. Donaghy,B.S. June 1999, Senior Thesis: Spatial Structure of Hard-Xray Impulsive Solar Flares.
• Alexander Maloney, B.S. March 1998, Senior Thesis: Evolution of Quasar luminosity Function.
• Shimpei Yamashita, B.S. June 1996, Senior Thesis: Surface brightness and luminosity function of galaxies.

Useful Links

Particle Acceleration Code: This code computes the particle and photon spectrum of particles undergoing
stochastic acceleration in a user specified environment:
Postscript Version of documentation
PDF Version of documentation
Tar file containing source code, libraries, etc., including the actual executable program "flare"
Sample sm plotting routine (very basic!)

Astronomy Home Page