David J. Jeffery: Research Interests

I work primarily in the areas of supernova and radiative transfer research. Supernovae are the giant explosions of old stars. With the singular exception of SN 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the explosion event has never been observed: it is very brief and bright in the extreme ultraviolet and X-ray. In the weeks following the explosion, the expanding supernova ejecta become very luminous in the optical---brighter than entire galaxies in some cases. Thus understanding supernovae requires interpreting their light and spectra from well after the explosion. This interpretation requires modeling the radiative transfer in the ejecta. I am a specialist in parameterized radiative transfer modeling which is a technique which yields approximate information quickly. This approximate information guides more detailed self-consistent modeling. To improve the modeling of supernova radiative transfer, I have developed the Sobolev-P method for polarized radiative transfer and have applied the relativistic Sobolev method to supernovae. At the present time, I am most interested in Type Ia supernovae (SNe~Ia) which are the brightest kind of supernovae and which are very important in cosmological research.