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Ignacio de la Calle
21 September 2006
ESAC Faculty Jamboree
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I started my work here at ESAC in May 2006. I have a contract with
INSA as a postdoc through a Torres Quevedo Fellowship. I come from
the field of High Energy ground-based gamma-ray Astronomy, where I
have worked for the past 9 years in different experiments. I am
currently working with XMM-Newton data by searching the archive for
Blazars, a type of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), by
cross-correlating the archive with catalogues at other wavelengths.
The aim of this work is to build an XMM sample of Blazars with
their X-ray properties and try to identify amongst these objects
the best candidates for TeV emission. Also, I collaborate with
people from the Blazar group within the VERITAS Collaboration
(which operates the VERITAS Cerenkov Telescope Array) in the study
of TeV blazars. One of the tasks of this group involves setting up
multiwavelength campaigns, which usually include several
ground-based and satellite-based observatories, like MAGIC,
VERITAS, INTEGRAL and XMM. These types of observations represent the
only means to characterize the Spectral Energy Distribution of
blazars with meaningfull information to constrain emission model
parameters, and to try to answer the ultimate question about the
origin of the non-thermal emission present in this type of
object.
 
I started my PhD in September 1997 at the Universidad Complutense
de Madrid in the field of High Energy gamma-ray Astronomy working
in the HEGRA experiment, an array of Cerenkov telescopes which was
located in El Roque de Los Muchahos at La Palma. During two years I
worked mainly on Monte Carlo simulations of Extensive Air Showers
and its detection by Cerenkov Telescopes. After these two years in
Madrid I had the chance to go to Leeds University were I started
over my PhD in 1999. There I worked again in the field of High
Energy gamma-ray Astronomy for the Whipple Collaboration, which
operates the Whipple 10 meter gamma-ray telescope, located in
Tucson, Arizona. During my period in Leeds, I worked on several
things, the most relevant ones being, the study of the analogue
transmission of Cerenkov signals using optical fibre links, and the
search for TeV emission from BL Lac objects, which yielded the
detection of two new TeV Blazars. 

After my PhD I did a one year postdoc in Leeds working for the
VERITAS Collaboration, another High Energy gamma-ray experiment
which is an array of future generation Cerenkov Telescopes located
in Tucson, Arizona. During that time I worked in methods of
extracting the high energy spectra of TeV sources.
 
Finally, in September 2003 I moved to Oxford where I did a 3 year
postdoc where the main bulk of my work consisted of Monte Carlo
Simulations of a wide-angle camera to be employed on a Cerenkov
telescope. The study showed, amongst other things, that the
implementation of such a camera increases the sensitivity of these
telescopes by an order of magnitude at energies above 1TeV. The
results of this work are now under study by the different
ground-based gamma-ray experiments to see if this type of camera
should be employed in the next generation of Cerenkov telescopes.
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