I am currently doing my PhD in Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I spend my days exploring the mysteries of the early Universe. I am also a fan of quantum mechanics.

View my Google Scholar and SAO/NASA ADS profile, and find out about my research interests below.

Supermassive black hole growth

To date, more than 500 luminous quasars, hosting rapidly growing billion-solar-mass supermassive black holes (SMBHs), have been identified at a time when our Universe was approximately/less than a billion years old. This poses a challenge - how did these black holes grow so quickly at a time when structure formation was first taking place? To answer this question, I am interested in observationally constraining how long these SMBHs at high redshift have been growing. When black holes grow through accretion, they release copious amounts of radiation. I study the imprints of this radiation on the intergalactic medium (megaparsec scales, through proximity zones) or the circumgalactic medium (kiloparsec scales, through extended nebular emission) to measure the ages of these quasars, trying to disentangle different mechanisms that could have been at play in growing these SMBHs so quickly.

Epoch of Reionization

The Epoch of Reionization marked a phase transition when the hydrogen gas in between galaxies across the whole Universe went from neutral to ionized. This phase transition is thought to have been caused by the formation of the earliest structures, through ionizing radiation emitted mainly by stars and potentially also active galactic nuclei. I use the spectra of high-redshift quasars to constrain the timing of Reionization.

Some of my work was featured by MIT News.

Searches for the first stars

The first stars that formed in the early Universe, called Population III stars, are thought to be composed of pristine gas - just hydrogen and helium, with very little/no contribution from heavier elements. Finding these stars is made extremely difficult due to their early formation and short lifetimes. However, some of these stars or their signatures could still exist in small isolated halos even at later times and could be revealed through absorption spectroscopy along sightlines to distant, luminous quasars. Recently, I led the discovery of one such extremely metal-poor absorption system. I am interested in what we can learn about Population III stars by searching for and studying these isolated, late-time absorption systems.

Machine learning methods

Large astronomical datasets are the perfect use case for machine learning methods. In the past, I’ve used the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to build a machine learning models to predict the intrinsic spectra of high redshift quasars that otherwise are blocked from our sight due to the increased opacity caused by neutral hydrogen in the intergalactic medium during the Epoch of Reionization. For my Master’s thesis, I created a machine-learning model which can turn galaxy images from ground-based telescopes into space-telescope-like quality images.

Precision quantum measurements

Precision quantum metrology is a branch of physics which applies quantum-mechanical principles to improve the precision of all kinds of measurements we make: time, distance, force, or phase to list a few. This not only has many industrial applications, such as for navigation systems, biomedical imaging or computer chip manufacturing, but it also bears a very fundamental relevance - quantum-gravity experiments and dark matter detection are a few such areas where the toolkit of precision metrology has experienced a growing interest.

While at the Quantum and Precision Measurements Group, I got interested in how we can use the quantum-mechanical interaction between radiation and single particles to build an extremely sensitive force detector that could be used to study quantum-gravitational effects.

In summer 2018, I joined Professor Nergis Mavalvala and colleagues at the MIT LIGO Laboratory to perform an experiment aimed at producing optomechanically squeezed states of light to improve the precision of gravitational wave detectors. I designed and built the intensity stabilisation servo (ISS) to suppress the classical noise in a laser and thus prepare a quantum-noise limited beam for the rest of the experiment.

Past interests

I’ve also dabbled in exoplanet observations (more details below), the development of imaging systems for medical use (at the Tearney Lab), and simulations of quantum algorithms (at the Research Center for Quantum Information).

Back in high school, I got involved with the observatory in my hometown Hlohovec, where I studied transiting exoplanets as my very first research experience. We performed multi-band photometric observations of the TrES-1b exoplanet in Lyra with the local 60cm Cassegrain telescope, reduced and analysed the data, and published the transit light curves in the Exoplanet Transit Database.