Jiachen's Tips for Beginners in Cosimo's group

I usually write a diary to show my supervisor my recent work, either a mathmatica (.nb) file for simulation work or a diary (.html) for astronomical work. A email with only a couple of plots is not recommended at all because chances are that your supervisor has no idea what those plots are at all. A clean and clear diary with detailed caption for each plot will be very helpful in this case.

I also write a report regularly almost every other one or two weeks, depending on how much I have received. A report is a collection and an updated version of previous several diaries. In a report, you need write every detail how you have worked out those results especially when it comes to a data analysis project, such as the size of the source region you extracted, the normalization parameters and so on just in order to let your supervisor see what you have done or find possible mistakes you have made. Besides, not like a diary, you can ask questions, write any comments or make some conclusions for this project you are doing in a report.

Writing report is very helpful especially to a non-English-speaking student like us. Your supervisor, who is Cosimo, is mainly in charge of writing work. However you cannot totally rely on him because at some point in future you will have to write everything yourself in academic English.

A large fraction of work in Cosimo's group has been mainly focused on the test of general relativity in the strong gravity regime, especially considering X-ray observation/technology. Following are three assignments intended to help beginners to understand

1. Relativists effects in black hole disk iron line
2. Reproduce the procedure of black hole spin measurement using disk iron line
3. Xspec basic usage
4. Spin degeneracy in non-Kerr black hole spacetime

No specific knowledge of general relativity required. However basic C programming language, Advanced Maths I and College Physics I & II should be learned before starting this. As our group has been finishing up working out our new non-Kerr reflection model, this set of ray tracing code mentioned in these assignments may not be very helpful except for either beginners who haven't gained a clear physics picture of lamp-post geometry and how spin measurement works in reality or students who barely have interest in real data analysis but still would like to study General Relativity test.

assignment1 (for phy)

assignment1 (for astro)

Irradiation of an Accretion Disc by a Jet: General Properties and Implications for Spin Measurements of Black Holes

assignment2.pdf

assignment3.pdf

(If you meet any problem, please feel free to contact with Prof Bambi, Jiachen or any other senior students who have done these assignments.)

Contacts:

* Cosimo Bambi Email:bambi@fudan.edu.cn

* Jiachen Jiang Email:jcjiang12@fudan.edu.cn

* Yueying Ni Email:yyni13@fudan.edu.cn

Most questions asked by beginners are about textbooks. Personally I have not read many books but mainly review papers. However here are well-written books related to our research and you may pick up some for interest or further study.

1 General Relativity

• Relativity, Gravitation and Cosmology (Robert J.A. Lambourne, Cambridge) This is a perfect textbook for beginners, including relativity theory and a glimpse of basic cosmology knowledge. No fancy Maths skills required.
• Gravity: an Introduction to Einstein's General Relativity (James B. Hartle, Pearson) This is the textbook used in General Relativity class at the University of British Columbia. Some advanced Maths skills are required.

2 Astronomical Measurement

• Observational Astronomy (Edmund C. Sutton, Cambridge) This is the textbook used in Astronomical Measurement class (for graduate students) at the University of British Columbia. It is well written and includes all the basic astronomy knowledge. I have kept this book as a reference book for my research.

3 Cosmology

• Introduction to Particle Cosmology: the Standard Model of Cosmology and its Open Problems(C. Bambi and A.D. Dolgov, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg) Written by two amazing scientists. You know them. Its Chinese version is coming soon.
• Mordren Particle Pysics (Mark Thomson, Cambridge) An excellent book covering simple and useful particle physics knowledge.

4 Presentations

• Basic Statistics knowledge statistics.pdf
• 2014 Fudan winter school http://bambi2014.fudan.edu.cn/school2014/Program.html

* Chandra data archive: http://tgcat.mit.edu

* Chandra (CIAO) installation http://cxc.harvard.edu/sherpa/ahelp/cash.html

* Swift hard X-ray transient monitor http://swift.gsfc.nasa.gov/results/transients/

* XMM-Newton data analysis threads http://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/xmm-newton/sas-threads

* ALMA data analysis https://almascience.eso.org/alma-data

* ftool: to make simple table model (flx2tab) https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/ftools/caldb/help/flx2tab.html

* ftool: to make simple spectrum with flat response (flx2xsp) https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/ftools/caldb/help/flx2xsp.html

* Heasoft installation http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/software/lheasoft/download.html

* CALDB download http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/heasarc/caldb/caldb_intro.html

* Raw observational data interface search https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/W3Browse/w3browse.pl

* Xspec manual https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/xanadu/xspec/manual/manual.html

* The RELXILL model http://www.sternwarte.uni-erlangen.de/~dauser/research/relxill/index.html

* Date/time conversion utility http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/Tools/xTime/xTime.pl

* X-ray transition energies search http://physics.nist.gov/PhysRefData/XrayTrans/Html/search.html

* ASDC data center http://www.asdc.asi.it/