Alexey Vikhlinin
I am a deputy associate director of the High Energy Astrophysics
Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, office: B-444, phone: 617-495-7044.
avikhlinin@head.cfa.harvard.edu
I am also a senior researcher at the High Energy Astrophysics department of the
Space
Research Institute in Moscow, Russia
Quick links:
тАв 400 deg2 survey pages
тАв TeX, perl, science data analysis
My main research area is X-ray studies of galaxy clusters and their applications
for cosmology and physics of the intergalactic medium. The main past projects in
this area include
- Development of the efficient detection pipeline for extended X-ray sources --
the backbone of the 160 and 400 square degrees surveys;
- Using Chandra to study cold fronts in merging clusters
- Reconstruction of the mass distribution in low-redshift clusters from deep
Chandra observations and study of cluster evolution at high redshifts
- Using X-ray observations to constrain Dark Energy parameters using evolution
of the cluster mass function.
The plans for near future include collaboration with the South Pole Telescope
team on X-ray observations of clusters discovered by their Sunyaev-Zeldovich
signal; improvements in the cluster mass calibration using weak lensing
techniques; studies of interplay between stellar and gaseous baryonic components
in clusters; helping theorists to improve the intracluster medium modeling in
numerical simulations; also helping to make sure that a next-generation all-sky
X-ray survey (e.g., SRG/eRosita or WFXT) becomes a reality.
Short bio: I was born in Russia and moved to the US only after
finishing my PhD in Moscow. I still collaborate closely with people in
Moscow. For those who wonder where exactly I'm from: the place is called
Ryazan', it is about 130 miles to the South-East of Moscow. My family
actually comes from near what was the first major Russian city sacked by
Mongols in 1237 (it never recovered but you can still see the traces of the city on Google maps
-- notice the circular patter ~0.5miles in diameter at the center of the
frame).
A more formal CV:
-
1993: Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, M.S. summa cum
laude (major in Space Physics).
-
1995: Institute for Space Research, Moscow, PhD (astronomy)
"Quasi-periodic oscillations of X-ray emission from Galactic black hole
candidates. Deep surveys in soft X-rays, study of AGNs and clusters of
galaxies" (thesis in Russian)
-
1996-1999: CfA Postdoctoral Fellow
-
1999-present: Senior researcher, Institute for Space Research, Moscow
-
2003: Doctor of Sciences, Russian Academy of Sciences: "Observational
cosmology and studies of physics of the intracluster medium using X-ray observations of
clusters of galaxies" (thesis in Russian)
2004: Zeldovich medal from International Committee on Space Research (COSPAR)
2003: State prize of the Russian Federation, awarded to young scientists
2008: Rossi prize of the American Astronomical Society for work on cluster
cosmology and cold fronts (shared with S.Allen, J.P.Henry, and M.Markevitch)
Other activities:
I do some programming in TeX and Perl. Check out my
astronomy-aware
command-line calculator and my attempt to re-implement a good old DOS
rename
command. In TeX, my most useful achievement is probably the
emulateapj
package but the most intellectually-demanding one was clearly a
typesetting
system for medieval Russian script. Some of my science analysis software
(including the wavelet decomposition code used for cluster detection in the 400d
survey) is available at
SAO
RD pages.