Varun Varun

I am interersted in high energy obervation and instrumentation in astronomy. I take strong interest in research related to X-ray polarisation of astronomical sources. There have been lot of research related for high energy emission from astronomical sources but polarisation is still a missing piece in the puzzle of modern high energy astronomy. I have been chasing this challenge in my entire astronomical career.

Currently, I am involved in two projects related to hard X-ray polarimetry: 1) XL-Calibur and 2) COMCUBE-S. XL-Calibur is a balloon mission aimed to study the hard X-ray (15-60 keV) polarisation of bright persistent sources like Crab Pulsar and Cygnus X-1.  COMCUBE-S is aimed to study the high energy polarisation of GRBs which is even more challenging task considering their short active span in high energy.

Perviously, I worked on the instrumentation of POLIX/XpoSat. I spend a significant part of my thesis permorming ground calibration studies of POLIX. This is a Thomson scattering based X-ray polarimeter mission which operates in 8-30 keV complementry to the energy range of IXPE (2-10 keV) and XL-calibur (15-60 keV). Apart from this, I have also worked on the instrumentation related to AstroSat : India's first multiwavelength astromonical telescope. I worked with X-ray pipeline development and background estimation of LAXPC intrument on this mission.

I also enjoy data analysis from astronomical sources like X-ray binaries (XRBs) and Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). These sources have most extreme physical conditions in terms of temperature, gravitational and magnetic fieds. I have used data from the following  space telescopes for studying these.

1. AstroSat

2. XMM-Newton

3. NuSTAR

4. Fermi

5. Swift

6. NICER

The list is still not complete and I would like to use many more telescopes to explore the wonders of universe.