ILP Newsletter #001 | May 2014

First ILP Day

The first ILP day took place on March 13, 2014 at the UPMC. This day was mainly dedicated to present research highlights, scientific achievements driven by Lagrange Fellows, and to discuss new directions and research priorities of the ILP within the next few months. [more]

Scientific Highlight: Planck project

The Planck team released this image of the first all-sky observations of polarized light emitted by interstellar dust in the Milky Way. Planck member Paul Sutter helped create this visualisation of galactic magnetic field lines at the Lagrange Institute. [more]

Milky Way's magnetic fingerprint
© ESA and the Planck Collaboration

Lagrange Awards

After the 3 month-stay of Tom Abel from the KIPAC and Stanford University at the IAP in 2013, the Lagrange Institute is honoured to welcome the Professor Tsvi Piran from the Racah Institute of Physics. Prof. Tsvi Piran will spend 3 months in Paris, from August 2014, to collaborate with ILP's teams.
He will pursue his research projects in relativistic astrophysics and develop natural collaborations on Gamma-Ray Bursts with members of the group "Cosmology and High Energy Astrophysics" at the IAP but also with the group "Theoretical Physics: Gravitation and Cosmology" and with the LPNHE and LPTHE on topics such as gravitational radiation, Lorentz invariance or Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays.

Yi Mao, Postdoctoral Fellow at IAP

After completing my Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 2008 and 4 years in a postdoctoral position in astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin, I joined the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris in 2012 as a Lagrange Fellow.

My research aims to understand the cosmological evolution of the intergalactic medium during the so-called epoch of reionization, a period of time when the intergalactic hydrogen atoms were ionized by ultraviolet and X-ray photons emitted from the first generation of galaxies at the cosmic age between a hundred million to a billion years old.

I am a theoretical astrophysicist, with a focus on developing new radiative transfer algorithms to numerically simulate the cosmic reionization using large-scale supercomputers. A major application of my research is to predict the signature of reionization on the redshifted 21-cm radiation signal that will be measured by a number of ongoing and upcoming radio telescopes. This will shed light on the physical condition of our young Universe during the epoch of reionization.

Yi Mao


Contact:
mao[at]iap[dot]fr

Personal homepage: www2.iap.fr/users/mao

Mariangela Settimo


Contact:
mariangela.settimo
[at]lpnhe.in2p3.fr

Mariangela Settimo, Postdoctoral Fellow at LPNHE

My research activity is focused on the study of ultra high energy cosmic rays, hitting the Earth with huge energies, up to about 30 Joules. Their origin and nature is still unknown, although they are most probably produced in extragalactic astrophysical sources. During my PhD, I started to work in the context of the Pierre Auger Observatory, the largest ground-based observatory of cosmic rays in the world.

I obtained my PhD in 2010 at University of Salento (Lecce, Italy) with a thesis about the measurement of the energy spectrum of such particles. I continued my studies as a postdoc at the University of Siegen (Germany) and in May 2013 I joint the astro-particle group at the Laboratoire de Physique Nucléaire et des Haute Energies (LPNHE) in Paris.

Currently I am a Lagrange fellow and I am mainly involved in the search for ultra-high energy photons, that carry informations about the sources and propagation of cosmic rays, and in the development of new detectors with the goal of measuring the chemical composition of ultra-high energy cosmic rays.