EPSSI Seminar: Dr. Kristi Engel

This event will be held in the Dow Building. Refreshments and a social will be held at 3:30 p.m. on the eighth floor in room 875, with the seminar to follow at 4 p.m. in the same location.

Dr. Kristi Engel, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Maryland, College Park, and serves as the U.S. Operations Manager for the HAWC Observatory, will give a talk on Monday, October 19th. The title of the talk is "Searching for Very-High-Energy Transients with Ground-Based Gamma-Ray Observatories."

Abstract: Gamma-ray bursts, gravitational waves, neutrino events, and other transient phenomena are prime targets for multi-wavelength and multi-messenger follows ups within the high-energy astrophysics community. However, observation of such short-lived sources are not always feasible for many instruments. Ground-based survey instruments, such as the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory, boast large instantaneous fields of view and observe 2/3rds of the sky daily with near continuous uptime, allowing them not only ideal conditions to catch these targets of opportunity as they occur, but also to analyze archival data after the fact. The HAWC Observatory, detecting gamma rays with energies from hundreds of GeV to over 100 TeV, can immediately begin analysis of a transient source in its field of view (~2 sr) for both external and self triggers. Additionally, with ten years of archival data, HAWC performs offline analyses of transients such as Gamma-Ray Bursts and Primordial Black Holes. We present here an overview of current survey observatories, HAWC’s transient detection framework, and results from searches for such transients, as well as highlight the future of survey instruments with the proposed Southern Wide-field Gamma-ray Observatory (SWGO).

Bio: Dr. Kristi Engel is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Maryland, College Park and serves as the U.S. Operations Manager for the HAWC Observatory. She received her PhD in Physics from UMD in 2023. Her research focuses on the detection of Primordial Black Holes and Gamma-Ray Bursts using very-high-energy gamma rays, with recent extensions to theoretical Dark Sector models. Dr. Engel is a former DOE Graduate Research Fellow and recipient of the Arnulfo Zepeda HAWC Award. Looking to the future, she is also involved in prototyping work for the planned Southern Wide-field Gamma-ray Observatory (SWGO).