Alexey Vikhlinin

I am a deputy associate director of the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. avikhlinin@cfa.harvard.edu


 Quick links:
 • 400 deg2 survey pages
 • TeX, perl, science data analysis

My main research area is X-ray studies of galaxy clusters and their applications for cosmology and physics of the intergalactic medium. The main past projects in this area include
- Development of the efficient detection pipeline for extended X-ray sources -- the backbone of the 160 and 400 square degrees surveys;
- Using Chandra to study cold fronts in merging clusters
- Reconstruction of the mass distribution in low-redshift clusters from deep Chandra observations and study of cluster evolution at high redshifts
- Using X-ray observations to constrain Dark Energy parameters using evolution of the cluster mass function.

The plans for near future include collaboration with the South Pole Telescope team on X-ray observations of clusters discovered by their Sunyaev-Zeldovich signal; improvements in the cluster mass calibration using weak lensing techniques; studies of interplay between stellar and gaseous baryonic components in clusters; helping theorists to improve the intracluster medium modeling in numerical simulations.

I am co-chairing the science & technology definition team for Lynx, a powerful next-generation X-ray Observatory 'for the rest of us' which goes in competition at the 2020 US Decadal Survey.

Short bio: I was born in Russia and moved to the US only after finishing my PhD in Moscow. I still collaborate closely with people in Moscow. For those who wonder where exactly I'm from: the place is called Ryazan', it is about 130 miles to the South-East of Moscow. My family actually comes from near what was the first major Russian city sacked by Mongols in 1237 (it never recovered but you can still see the traces of the city on Google maps -- notice the circular patter ~0.5miles in diameter at the center of the frame).

A more formal CV:









2004: Zeldovich medal from International Committee on Space Research (COSPAR)

2003: State prize of the Russian Federation, awarded to young scientists

2008: Rossi prize of the American Astronomical Society for work on cluster cosmology and cold fronts (shared with S.Allen, J.P.Henry, and M.Markevitch)


Other activities:

I do some programming in TeX and Perl. Check out my astronomy-aware command-line calculator and my attempt to re-implement a good old DOS rename command. In TeX, my most useful achievement is probably the emulateapj package but the most intellectually-demanding one was clearly a typesetting system for medieval Russian script. Some of my science analysis software (including the wavelet decomposition code used for cluster detection in the 400d survey) is available at SAO RD pages.