General information
Organisation
The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) is a key player in research, development and innovation in four main areas :
• defence and security,
• nuclear energy (fission and fusion),
• technological research for industry,
• fundamental research in the physical sciences and life sciences.
Drawing on its widely acknowledged expertise, and thanks to its 16000 technicians, engineers, researchers and staff, the CEA actively participates in collaborative projects with a large number of academic and industrial partners.
The CEA is established in ten centers spread throughout France
Reference
SL-DRF-27-0078
Direction
DRF
Thesis topic details
Category
Corpuscular physics and outer space
Thesis topics
Tidal disruption events in real time: from Rubin/LSST alerts to TeV gamma rays with H.E.S.S. and CTAO, and a bridge to LISA
Contract
Thèse
Job description
When a star ventures too close to a supermassive black hole, it is torn apart by tidal forces in a tidal disruption event (TDE). These rare flares reveal otherwise dormant black holes and may launch relativistic jets that accelerate particles to extreme energies, yet no TeV gamma-ray emission from a TDE has been detected so far. The Rubin Observatory (LSST) will discover thousands of TDEs, provided they are identified early among millions of nightly alerts and followed up quickly.
This PhD builds on our group's TRACER project and will develop the gamma-ray branch of this chain. The student will integrate the TDE candidates classified by the Fink broker into the Astro-COLIBRI platform (web and smartphone apps) and select those most promising for very-high-energy emission. The student will then trigger and analyse observations with H.E.S.S. and, later, CTAO, complemented by X-ray and radio data. In parallel, the student will explore a link to the future gravitational-wave observatory LISA, in particular extreme-mass-ratio inspirals (stellar-mass compact objects spiralling into massive black holes) in galactic nuclei. This involves studying TDE@LISA observability and defining how LISA alerts (timescales, thresholds, localisation) could be distributed through Astro-COLIBRI. Expected results are a working alert-to-observation pipeline, the first systematic gamma-ray detections or constraints on particle acceleration in TDEs, a contribution to the CTAO TDE science programme, and a prototype of LISA alert handling.
University / doctoral school
PHENIICS (PHENIICS)
Thesis topic location
Site
Saclay
Requester
Position start date
01/10/2027
Person to be contacted by the applicant
Schussler Fabian
fabian.schussler@cea.fr
CEA
DRF/IRFU
IRFU/DPhP
CEA Paris-Saclay
91191 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex
+33169083020
Tutor / Responsible thesis director
Schussler Fabian
fabian.schussler@cea.fr
CEA
DRF/IRFU
IRFU/DPhP
CEA Paris-Saclay
91191 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex
+33169083020
En savoir plus
https://www.multimessenger-astronomy.com/
https://irfu.cea.fr/dphp/index.php