Suman Bala, PhD

Suman Bala, PhD

Email:  SBala @ usra.edu

Suman Bala completed his Ph.D. in astrophysics from Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune, INDIA. During his Ph.D., Suman worked with the X-ray data of various satellites to probe the evolution of the magnetic fields of neutron stars through the Cyclotron Resonance Scattering Features (CRSFs) or cyclotron lines. To study the variation of the CRSFs, He worked on the theoretical modeling of CRSFs. The team is creating fittable functions or table models in the commonly used spectral fitting package XSPEC/ISIS/SHERPA to compare the theoretical predictions from the team's radiative transfer code with the observed spectra. Suman is also interested in studying the spectral and timing properties of Thermonuclear (type-I) bursts (TNBs) to measure NS parameters.

Suman was a postdoctoral fellow at IIT Bombay. There, he was introduced to X-ray polarimetry. He started working on the polarization measurement of high-energy photons (especially from Gamma-ray bursts, GRBs) by Compton scattering. Suman worked on developing the pipeline to measure the polarization for the proposed Indian satellite DAKSHA. Currently, his primary interest is to study GRB physics. He also wants to explore physical phenomena prevailing from different X-ray binary sources.