Speaker
Description
One method used to infer the mass and radius of a neutron star is Pulse Profile Modelling (PPM). PPM connects X-ray emission from localized regions on the neutron star's surface to a modulated signal seen in X-ray detectors (such as NICER). The analysis requires relativistic raytracing， which creates a computational bottle-neck that leads to two issues: the analysis of data is very slow， and that the analysis is restricted to very simple spot models (a few circles).In this talk， I will introduce a new code that implements the raytracing algorithm run on GPU， instead of the more traditional CPU. This introduces a significant speed-up of the computations required. I will show that this speed-up does not compromise the accuracy of the modelling. Our new code also allows for more complicated spot patterns， which could， in the future， be used to model physically-motivated spots that are connected to magnetic field geometries.
| Academic Status | I am a Ph.D. student |
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