Past work ✧ Co-author
Here I highlight past works I have contributed to
Signatures of Density Fluctuations in CGM Absorption (2024)
In my final quarter at the University of Washington, I worked with Post-Doc Yakov Faerman and Professor Matt McQuinn to better understand the effect of variations in temperature and density along a sightline on the inferred gas properties from observations. This research is pertinent for CGM research as models for photoionization are used to translate ion column densities measured from absorption lines to the density and ionization state of the absorbing gas. While these models have greatly informed our perspective of the CGM, they often rely on assuming the absorbing gas exists at a single temperature and density, which does not account for the effects of turbulent or mixing gas. Thus, more realistic photoionization models are required to better constrain CGM properties. For this project, I used models of gas density and temperature to explore physical scenarios likely to be present in the CGM, for instance, gas that is mixing, turbulent, or cooling. I then used Cloudy to calculate the ion abundances for each scenario and compared our results to observations to understand the effect of these distributions.
The Impact of Cosmic Rays on the Kinematics of the CGM (2022)
As an undergraduate at the University of Washington working with Graduate Student Iryna Butsky, I contributed to this project by utilizing novel synthetic spectroscopy techniques to determine column densities and velocity distributions of various ions within the Patient0 galaxy simulation and a second Patient0 iteration with CR physics implemented. Extracting this data using Python-based, observer-developed Voigt profile fitting tools, I was able to directly compare spectral line properties in our simulation to observations in the COS-Halos survey. With this approach, we demonstrated the implementation of CRs produced O VI and Si III kinematic structures and absorption feature widths in better agreement with observations.