Current PhD Thesis Fellows
Mathieu Chretien
After completing my Master degree in 2012 (University of Uppsala, Sweden), I started a PhD thesis funded by the Lagrange Institute at LPNHE (IN2P3, Université Pierre et Marie Curie).
My research work concerns the search for Lorentz Invariance Violation (LIV) with very high energy photons coming from pulsars. This effect is predicted by some Quantum Gravity models and can be probed using time of flight measurements of photons coming from variable astrophysical sources. To achieve this task, I am working within the H.E.S.S. collaboration, an array of Imaging Cherenkov telescopes located in Namibia. Since 2012 a new telescope with a mirror surface of 614 m2 was added to the system in order to increase the sensitivity and lower the energy threshold to a few tens of GeV. With this newcomer we should be able among other to observe pulsars beyond ~ 30 GeV, and access a new energy domain for indirect dark matter searches.
Since the start of my thesis, I was involved in the calibration of the new instrument, the development of a pulsar simulation tool throughout the whole Monte Carlo chain of HESS. In July 2014, the telescope observed its first pulsar (see press release) enabling the start of LIV studies.
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