I spent this past summer working at NASA - Goddard Space Flight Center
in Greenbelt, Maryland. I worked with Professor Peter Gonthier from Hope,
and
two astrophysicists at Goddard, Alice Harding and Matthew Baring. They have
created a computer model of radiation from a high magnetic field gamma ray
pulsar, known as PSR 1509-58. Due to its extremely high magnetic field
(3x10^13 gauss), the magnetosphere of this pulsar is one of the few places in
the universe that a reaction known as Magnetic Photon Splitting can occur.
This reaction is predicted by QED, but cannot be studied on Earth due to the
high B fields necessary. There is evidence for this reaction in the spectrum
of PSR 1509-58 (a high energy cut-off in the gamma-ray region of the
spectrum).
Dr. Harding and Dr. Baring have created a computer model to simulate this
reaction and other reactions in the magnetosphere of this pulsar to see if the
observed spectrum could be matched. I worked on this project over the summer,
adding a few new features to the model to make it more physically accurate, as
well as improving the computational performance of the program (faster and more
accurate).
Scott
Slezak