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Subject 1: "Characterising the elusive nature of Fast Radio Bursts"
Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are flashes of radio light which have been
discovered in 2007. As such, their origin is still partly
unconstrained. The current evidence points towards neutron stars as
their most likely progenitor, especially in the case of repeating
FRBs: the ones from which more than one burst has been observed.
The student will work on tackling this issue from three different
perspectives
- Contribution to the development of the data analysis pipeline
and of the commissioning observations of the Canadian telescope
CHORD. CHORD is the heir of the CHIME telescope, which has discovered
most of FRBs known to date. CHORD will expand the capabilities of
CHIME with more sensitivity (to observe fainter/more distant FRBs) and
with precise localisation, which will enable the use of FRBs as
cosmological probes.
- Coordination of the ongoing multi-wavelength campaigns. FRB
models predict that the emission should occupy more than the radio
band only, as it happens for most of the astrophysical sources. No
counterpart of FRBs has been detected yet, but we are carrying out a
vast campaign, involving a big number of optical, X-ray and gamma-ray
telescopes to find the prompt counterpart of the radio burst.
- In-depth analysis of the single pulses of known nearby
pulsars. If we believe that neutron stars are at the basis of the
emission of FRBs, pulsars constitute a convenient lab to find
similarities with the FRB behaviour and hence characterise their
emission mechanisms.
Supervisor: Maura Pilia
Subject 2: "Multi-wavelength modeling of eclipsing binary pulsars"
Pulsars are fast-rotating, strongly magnetized neutron stars that
emit regular pulses of radiation at the same rate of the neutron star
rotation. Thanks to their extreme rotational stability, they can be
exploited as astrophysical clocks in the sky. The most precise pulsars
are the so-called millisecond pulsars (MSPs), which are most often
found in orbit around a companion star. A subclass of binary MSPs are
the “spider” pulsars, systems where a very-low mass companion star is
losing matter, causing regular or irregular eclipses of the pulsar’s
emission.
In this project, the student will study a set of eclipsing “spider”
pulsars, primarily using radio data taken with the South African
MeerKAT radio telescope. The analysis of the data will be complemented
by the development of a self-consistent model capable of accounting
for the main observables in the system (e.g. radio eclipses, optical
light curves). The goal is to shed light on the nature of the
eclipses, the process driving the mass loss from the companion, and
the origin of these systems.
Supervisor: Andrea Possenti
Subject 3: "Finding and studying pulsars with advanced radio telescopes"
Thanks to the clock-like nature of their signals, pulsars, rapidly
rotating, highly magnetised neutron stars, are incredible laboratories
to study many fields of astrophysics and fundamental physics: they can
be used to understand the neutron stars themselves and their emission
mechanism, to study the formation and evolution of binary systems, to
probe relativistic gravity and gravitational wave emission and to
constrain the equation of state of nuclear matter, among other things.
While we know of about 4000 such objects, finding new pulsars is
still crucial to understand the extent of their population and to find
the rarer, more extreme (and therefore more useful) objects among
them.
The pulsar group at INAF OAC is involved, often in leading
positions, in several experiments with some of the most advanced,
radio telescopes such as MeerKAT, the South African precursor of the
upcoming SKA-mid telescope, the Canadian CHORD (were INAF Cagliari is
the only non- american partner of the project), and SKA itself.
In this context the student will be directly involved is the pulsar
search experiments carried out at these state-of-the-art facilities by
- running and optimising the search pipelines
- implementing new search algorithms
- follow-up discoveries both in the radio band and at other frequencies to maximise the scientific output of the new
finding
Supervisor: Marta Burgay
Subject 4: "An archival investigation of pulsed spectra from neutron stars in high-mass X-ray binaries and
ultraluminous X-ray sources"
PULXs are extragalactic pulsars up to 500 times brighter than the
Eddington limit. It is unclear how they are able to produce this
emission; one possibility is that they have very high magnetic
fields. Through timing, we can make various measurements to estimate
their magnetic field, and comparison with less luminous (but closer
and better-studied) pulsars in our galaxy is crucial to assess the
robustness of the analysis. A Thesis on this topic will include
learning the main techniques of pulsar timing and applying them to
data from various satellites including IXPE, NuSTAR, NICER and
XMM-Newton.
Supervisor: Matteo Bachetti
Subject 5: "Tests of gravity in relativistic pulsar binaries with the new Large European Array for Pulsars
(LEAP 2.0)"
Pulsars are rapidly-rotating neutron stars that emit radio waves
from their magnetic poles, which can be detected by radio telescopes
at regular intervals with extreme precision. The high precision of
pulsar parameters enables us to study the dynamics of systems
consisting of a pulsar and a companion that is also a compact object,
the so-called relativistic binaries. This is done through the
detection of Post-Keplerian parameters which describe the relativistic
effects in the orbital dynamics due to General Relativity or other
(non-Newtonian) theories of gravity. In this project, the student will
study the science of relativistic binaries, and through simulations of
pulsar data, the capabilities of future radio telescopes to detect
these effects. In particular, the student will study the capabilities
of the new (future) Large European Array for Pulsars (LEAP 2.0), which
combines the capabilities of the best radio telescopes in Europe
through simultaneous observations.
Supervisor: Delphine Perrodin
Subject 6: "Testing the models of Quasi-Periodic Oscillations with physically-motivated frequency searches"
Quasi-periodic oscillations are signal oscillations with
non-constant frequency observed around neutron stars and black holes,
the origin of which is still a mystery. It is likely that there is no
single explanation, as there are various types of oscillations that
appear at different times and systems, at different frequencies and
with different behaviors. Possible explanations include from frame
dragging to resonances at specific distances from the compact
object. By running targeted, physically motivated searches for new
QPOs, we aim at testing the predictive power of the models. For Theses
on this topic, you will perform spectro-polarimetric- temporal
analysis of X-ray data from various black holes or neutron stars using
data from various satellites including IXPE, NuSTAR, NICER,
XMM-Newton, HXMT, RXTE.
Supervisor: Matteo Bachetti
Subject 7: ""
Supervisor:
Last update: 11-Sep-2026
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