Liam D. Connor, Ph.D.

I am a Canadian astrophysicist currently living in Los Angeles and working at the California Institute of Technology, where I am a Tolman Prize Postdoctoral Fellow. Prior to Caltech, I was a Postdoc at the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy at the University of Amsterdam. My research is focused on Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), a mysterious new class of extragalactic explosions. In general I use a variety of statistical, theoretical, and radio astronomical tools to study how the sky changes on very short timescales.

See here for a list of my publications.

I obtained my Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in October 2016, working at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) and the Dunlap Institute with Ue-Li Pen and Keith Vanderlinde.

Image credit: ESO/L. Calçada

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs)

Fast Radio Bursts were discovered serendipitously in 2007 with the Parkes telescope in Australia. They are millisecond blasts of radio waves, coming from external galaxies billions of light-years away. Though there appear to be thousands of FRBs across the full sky each day, we still do not know what produces them. But we do have some clues. Their tremendous energetics and short duration imply that they must come from extreme environments, whether black holes, the magnetospheres of neutron stars, from the collision of two compact objects, or perhaps something entirely new.

I have been working on this problem for the last few years. My research includes the proposal of a theory for the origin of FRBs, developing artificial intelligence algorithms to detect them in real-time on radio telescopes, and applying statistical techniques to the analysis of the FRB population as a whole.

ALERT & Apertif

ALERT is currently surveying the northern radio sky at millisecond timescales. It uses two telescopes in tandem, Apertif and LOFAR, both located in the northeast of the Netherlands. Apertif has begun routinely detecting FRBs at 1.4 GHz, including a high rotation measure burst that traverses the halo of nearby galaxy M33. On ALERT, I built several components of its signal processing backend, including a real-time FRB classifier based on modern artificial intelligence techniques. Once we start detecting FRBs we will be able to answer fundamental questions about the nature of this new extragalactic population.

Apertif on the Westerbork telescope. Image credit: Dr. Joeri van Leeuwen.
CHIME telescope near Penticton, British Columbia. Image credit: Andre Renard.

CHIME

During my Ph.D. I helped develop an innovative new radio telescope in British Columbia, Canada. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) consists of four 100-meter long cylinders with no moving parts (parabolic half-pipes, really). CHIME has three exciting and ambitious science goals. The first is to make the largest-ever 3D map of the Universe in order to measure how Dark Energy affects the Universe's dynamics. Another is to study pulsars, monitoring nearly every known pulsar in the northern hemisphere each day. And the third is an experiment to detect large numbers of Fast Radio Bursts, which it began finding in July 2018.