Thesis

The goal of my thesis is to understand the polarization of the emitted Lyman alpha radiation from galaxies.

Why is this interesting? The polarization signal from galaxies could reveal interesting facts about the dynamics of the medium (mostly dust and hydrogen) in galaxies. Is it outflowing? Inflowing? Are we having jets? This is useful information about galaxies that both are close (low redshift, or "z"), and far away (high-z). And: If we are lucky, maybe observations of the polarization signal of high-z galaxies (where we hardly see anything else than point sources glowing with some spatial extent) could reveal the dynamics of the galaxy?

How? To get an idea of what the polarization signal could be, I am working on the implementation of a polarization routine into a radiative transfer code which is able to handle different configurations of light sources, interstellar medium (ISM)-cloud configurations, and gas and dust dynamics.

Numerics! The radiative transfer code I am modifying, is written in the programming language C. But when I want to try out some (crazy?) ideas, I write code in Python (did you know that life can get a lot easier with an IPython notebook?). And I am not scared of Fortran (nor IDL!), at all!

My supervisor is Mark Dijkstra, and I am hacking Max Gronke's code

This web page was last updated in 2015.