This is a past event.

Henrike Fleischhack from NASA/Catholic University of America will be presenting at the next Physics Colloquium. Please join the in-person presentation at 4 p.m. Thursday (March 16) in Fisher Hall 139.

PeVATRONS AND BEYOND – WHERE ARE OUR UNIVERSE'S MOST POWERFUL PARTICLE ACCELERATORS?

Abstract: For more than a hundred years, we have known about cosmic rays, energetic charged particles impinging upon the Earth’s atmosphere from all directions. We have learned much about these particles and the cosmic accelerators that produce them, but many mysteries remain. In this talk, I will explain how we use multi-messenger data, including gamma-ray astronomy, to search for and study the sources of the most energetic cosmic rays inside and outside of our Milky Way. I will present the case of supernova remnant G106.3+2.7, recently identified as a source of energetic protons, as an example of how galactic "PeVatrons" can be identified. I will also speak to particle acceleration and multi-messenger signals from extra-galactic particle accelerators. I will show the challenges to be overcome and outline how future detectors can help understand cosmic accelerators even better.

Bio: Dr. Henrike Fleischhack is an Assistant Research Associate at Catholic University of America) and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Dr. Fleischhack received a B.Sc. (2009) and M.Sc. (2012) in Physics from Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Germany), and a Ph.D. in Physics from Humboldt-Universität Berlin (Germany) in 2017. She held postdoc positions at Michigan Technological University (2017-2020) and CUA/NASA GSFC (2020-2022).

Dr. Fleischhack’s research focuses on all aspects of ground- and space-based gamma-ray astronomy: From hardware development and instrument design over simulations and calibrations to event reconstruction and data analysis. She is a member of the Fermi-LAT and HAWC collaborations and of the AMEGO-X team. She served as working group coordinator for HAWC’s Data and Algorithms group (2018-2020) and simulations lead for the AMEGO-X MIDEX proposal (2020-2022). Dr. Fleischhack is part of the development teams of two open-source python packages for high-level data analysis: fermipy (for Fermi-LAT data analysis) and threeML (multi-wavelength data analysis).