Briefly, the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) demarcates the era in the history of the Universe when neutral gas in the intergalactic medium was almost entirely ionized by the radiation of the first sources. This epoch holds the key to structure formation and evolution, but also represents a missing piece of the puzzle in our current knowledge of the Universe. Currently, this is changing with the completion of a new generation of radio telescopes, which are capable of directly probing the EoR by detecting the radiation emitted by the neutral hydrogen from this epoch.
The Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) is the first telescope of this kind, and will use an array of simple radio antennas (dipoles) to detect the radio signals from the Universe. Beside the cosmological aim of the LOFAR project to probe the EoR, the observations with the LOFAR radio telescope will provide probably the deepest images of the low frequency radio sky. These images can be used for cutting-edge scientific studies, e.g. to explore the properties of the Galactic emission, magnetic fields, extragalactic sources, etc..
RECENT PAPERS
- Cosmological 21 cm experiments: Searching for a needle in a haystack, published in proceedings of "ISKAF2010 Science Meeting"
- Realistic Simulations of the Galactic Polarized Foreground: Consequences for 21-cm Reionization Detection Experiments, published in MNRAS
PREVIOUS RESEARCH
- Foreground simulations for the LOFAR-EoR experiment (a part of my PhD project at Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, the Netherlands)
- Cross-correlation study between the cosmological 21cm signal and the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (a part of my PhD project at Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, the Netherlands)
- Lyman alpha and beta forest in the spectra of distant quasars as a probe of the temperature fluctuations of the intergalactic medium (Summer Student program at Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, the Netherlands)
- Search for the Near Earth Objects (NEOs): asteroids and comets (Asteroids Follow-up Program at Visnjan Observatory, Croatia)
OTHER INTERESTS
- trekking, mountaineering and speleology
- photography