Paolo Desiati
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Cosmic rays are high-energy charged particles that stream through our galaxy, and mapping where they arrive from helps reveal the structure of the Milky Way near the Sun. But the map seen from Earth is distorted.
- Fields
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Physics
Computer Science
- Topics
cosmic rays
cosmic-ray anisotropy
heliosphere
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Simulate about 10 million cosmic-ray trajectories through heliospheric magnetic field models to calculate how particles from interstellar space are deflected before reaching Earth.
- Combine the trajectory results with IceCube and HAWC detector responses in the open-source CosmicRayMapper toolkit to correct for partial sky coverage and instrument biases.
- Validate the reconstruction by recovering known simulated interstellar distributions, scored by dipole and quadrupole recovery, angular power leakage and chi-square statistics, then apply it to public HAWC and IceCube sky maps.
More about the research
The heliosphere, the Sun's magnetic bubble around the Solar System, bends particle paths before they arrive. Ground observatories also see only part of the sky and have their own detector limits. So the observed cosmic-ray sky can look very different from the true one in interstellar space.
Why it matters
This is basic astrophysics. Reconstructing the cosmic-ray sky beyond the heliosphere adds an error-quantified picture of the Sun's interstellar neighborhood and of how the Sun's magnetic field reshapes incoming particles. The open toolkit could help researchers interpret data from IceCube, HAWC, the IMAP heliospheric mission and future observatories such as SWGO.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ke Fang
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Astronomy & Astrophysics·Early-career
Search for PeVatrons, sources that accelerate protons above 1 PeV, by jointly analyzing high-energy neutrino data from IceCube and gamma-ray data from the HAWC observatory.
Kaeli Hughes
Ohio State University, OH·Physics
Develop high-fidelity simulations of the radio emission produced when neutrinos and cosmic rays interact in and above Greenland's glacial ice, for use in analyzing RNO-G data.
Veronica Bindi
University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI·Physics
Operate and maintain the Simpson Neutron Monitor Network, ground detectors counting cosmic-ray secondaries, and deliver real-time count rates plus archived and high-resolution datasets to the research community.
The school
University of Wisconsin-Madison: 91 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 854 research doctorates a year.
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