Recent Talks

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the fossil light of the BigBang, is the oldest light that one can ever hope to observe in ourUniverse. The CMB provides us with a direct image of the Universe whenit was still an "infant" - 380,000 years old - and has enabled us to obtaina wealth of cosmological information, such as the composition, age,geometry, and history of the Universe. Yet, can we go further and learnabout the primordial universe, when it was much younger than 380,000years old, perhaps as young as a tiny fraction of a second? If so, thisgives us a hope to test competing theories about the origin of theUniverse at ultra high energies. In this talk I present the results from theWilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite that Icontributed, and then discuss the recent results from the Plancksatellite (in which I am not involved). Finally, I discuss future prospectson ourquest to probe the physical condition of the very early Universe.

Lecture 3; HTRA: Future developments/new technologies
 - X-ray: AXTAR, LOFT, XEUS/Athena, Lobster concept
 - optical/IR; MKIDS, STJs, ultra-fast detectors

Lecture 3 & 4:
- Reconstruction methods
- Fast photometry
- Lightcurve modeling demo

Lecture 3: Types of signals
-- Normalization
- Spectrograms
- Welch
- Time-frequency
- Rebinning
- Dead-time
- Fitting PDS

Lecture 3:  Models for the variable multi-wavelength emission of black hole
binaries: accretion flow
- The structure of inner accretion flow inferred from X-ray spectral modelling
- The most popular model for the X-ray fast variability and QPOs
- Fast optical variability from the accretion flow:
   * disk reprocessing
   * synchrotron emission from non-thermal particles in the hot corona
- Optical QPOs  from the accretion flow

Lecture 2: Poissonian
- Normalization
- Spectrograms
- Welch
- Time-frequency
- Rebinning
- Dead-time
- Fitting PDS

Lecture 2:
- Oscillations, pulsations and seismology
- Transits and Eclipses

Lecture 1: Fourier theory
- Continuous and discrete Fourier Transform
- Power spectra
- Window carpentry
- FFT

Lecture 2: HTRA: Current technologies
- X-ray: RXTE to ASTROSAT, Chandra, XMM, NuSTAR
- optical/IR: EMCCDs, APDs, MCP-based systems
- UV: HST, Galex

Lecture 2: Radiation processes:
- Cyclo-synchrotron
- Curvature radiation
- Compton
- Bremstrahlung
- Electron/positron pair production and annihilation