COLLOQUIUM
Department of Physics and Astronomy
California State University, Los Angeles
The Compton Spectrometer and Imager: Principles of Compton Telescopes and Effects of Radiation Damage on Energy Reconstruction
Dr. Sean Pike
CAAS Postdoctoral Fellow, UC San Diego
The Compton Spectrometer and Imager, or COSI, is a NASA Small Explorer mission scheduled for launch in 2027. COSI will image the soft gamma-ray sky with unprecedented angular and spectral resolution. I will discuss the primary science goals of the COSI mission and how these goals will be accomplished by the COSI instrument. The instrument will consist of four stacks of germanium strip detectors, utilizing Compton scattering in order to infer the origin, polarization, and energy of incoming gamma-ray photons. This design necessarily produces degeneracy between the precision of the various measured values. Therefore, rigorous calibration of all aspects of the detectors is key to the success of the mission. I will discuss one aspect of this calibration: the effects of radiation damage on the COSI detectors, the resulting degradation of spectral resolution in low-Earth orbit, and the prospects for ameliorating these effects in flight.
Thursday, April 25, 3:05 - 4:20 PM
Zoom Link: https://calstatela.zoom.us/j/83178870319
Spring 2024 Department of Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Schedule
(All talks presented via Zoom unless otherwise stated. This schedule will be updated throughout the semester.)
- January 25: no colloquium
- February 1: Dr. Charlotte Olsen, CUNY City Tech, "Exploring the role of environment on galaxy evolution through galaxy star formation histories"
- February 8: Dr. Al-Amin Dhirani, University of Toronto, "Quantum “nanoengineered” materials using a building-block approach"
- February 15: Dr. Amruta Jaodand, Harvard & Smithsonian, "The Enigmatic Transitional Millisecond Pulsars"
- February 22: Dr. Katy Rodriguez Wimberly, CSU San Bernardino, "Ultra–faint Dwarf Galaxies: Their Evolutionary Histories & Galactic Correlations," in-person
- February 29: Dr. Joanna Piotrowska, Caltech, "Putting Breaks on Star formation in Galaxies: The Cosmological Impact of Supermassive Black Holes," in-person
- March 7: Physics & Astronomy Career Panel featuring Dr. Margaret Lazzarini, Carl Heft, Carey Weisberg, C.J. Salgado, and Bing Jiang, in-person & Zoom
- March 14: Dr. Natalie Nicole Sanchez, Carnegie Observatories and Caltech, "Connecting Cosmic Gas Flows, Supermassive Black Hole Growth, and Galactic Evolution," in-person
- March 21: Dr. Francisco Mercado, Pomona College and Caltech, "Nature vs. Nurture: How internal and external processes shape galactic interiors," in-person
- March 28: Dr. Cliff Johnson, Northwestern University and Adler Planetarium, "The Universe and the Zooniverse: Exploring the Cosmos with Millions of Citizen Scientists"
- April 4: Spring Break, no colloquium
- April 11: Dr. Ashmeet Singh, Whitman College, "A Quantum Fueled Universe: Toolkit for Scalar Fields in Universes with Finite-Dimensional Hilbert Spaces"
- April 18: Undergraduate Honors Talks featuring Jordan O'Kelley, "Simulating Organic Molecules in the Protostellar Disk to Understand the Origins of Life," and Cristian Reynaga Gonzalez, "Thermal Decomposition of Nickel(II) Tetraphenylporphyrin: Core-Shell Nanoparticle Synthesis, Characterization, and Magnetic Properties," in-person
- April 25: Dr. Sean Pike, UC San Diego, "The Compton Spectrometer and Imager: Principles of Compton Telescopes and Effects of Radiation Damage on Energy Reconstruction"