I completed my Ph.D. in Astronomy from the API, UvA in 2020, 4 years after completing my Masters in Physics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. At API, my advisor is Prof. Sera Markoff, who is the professor of high energy astrophysics, while my co-advisor is Prof. Alexander (Sasha) Tchekhovskoy, professor at Northwestern University, Evanston. I’m also a member of the theory division in the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. Currently, I’m at the Black Hole Initiative, Harvard University as a fellow.
Research Interests
I’m particularly interested simulating jets from first-principle evolution of magnetized accretion disks around spinning (and non-spinning black holes) in a wide variety of astrophysical scenarios, from the supermassive black holes residing at the centers of hyperactive galaxies, known as Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN, in short), to stellar-mass black holes which glow bright in the Xray frequency band (and hence, called X-ray binaries). For e.g., in my first paper, I simulated the largest (in spatial and temporal extent) 2D GRMHD relativistic jets to date, spanning over five orders of magnitude in both distance and time, connecting event horizon and galactic scales. Such a simulation helped to understand how jets get mass-loaded with gas, a necessary occurrence for interpreting observed AGN jets from VLBI studies.
Research Tools
For my studies, I primarily use H-AMR, an in-house developed GPU-accelerated GRMHD code (primary developer: Dr. Matthew Liska of Harvard University) for evolving the complex physics of accretion onto black holes and jet launching. In order to understand how general relativity, gas dynamics as well as magnetic fields result in what we see through telescopes, I use a GR raytracing radiation transfer code BHOSS to calculate synthetic black hole images, comparing especially with the Event Horizon Telescope images.
See some of my black hole movies on my youtube channel!
Koushik Chatterjee 