Valerie Mikles
Past and Present Research Projects

   Spring 2004- Present: I am currently working with Steve Eikenberry. Our group is called the SCRUM. The goal of my thesis is to identify and study jet-producing black hole systems. My approach is two-fold. The first part involves observation, analysis, and modeling of the archetype microquasar GRS 1915+105. The second part is a search for new microquasars in the Galactic Center.

PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS

• MIkles, Eikenberry, Rothstein and Bandyopadhyay. The Radius Dilemma: A brief look at the X-ray QPO Frequency- Radius connection. Presented at the Microquasar 2006 Workshop in Como, Italy.

• Microquasars: From Event Horizons to Jet Ejections ... A link to MY ORALS page.

• Mikles V. J., Eikenberry, S. S., and Rothstein, D. M. ``Does Low-Frequency X-ray QPO Behavior in GRS 1915+105 Influence Subsequent X-ray and Infrared Behavior?'' 2006, ApJ, 637, 978. ... A paper reporting observations and analysis of QPO Behavior in GRS 1915+105. A portion of this work was presented at the Triggering Relativistic Jets Conference in Cozumel, Mexico 2005.

• Mikles, V. J., Eikenberry, S. S., Muno, M. P., Bandyopadhyay, R. M., Patel, S. "Identification of the Infrared Counterpart to a Newly Discovered Stellar X-ray Source in the Galactic Center." ... A paper accepted (oct 2006) to the Astrophysical Journal reporting first results of a campaign to find and identify new compact objects in the Galactic Center... A portion of this work was presented at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in Washington, D.C., 2006 (AAS 207, 6.03). This work was also be presented at the Massive Stars Symposium in Baltimore, MD, 2006 and at the GTC: First Light conference in Miami Florida.

   Fall 2002-Spring 2004: I completed my second year (masters) reseach project working with Vicki Sarajedini. Using multi-epoch data collected by ACS as part of GOODS, I studied short-term variability of AGN. The work was presented at the AAS meeting in January 2003. ADS reference: 2003AAS...203.5503M.

   Summer 2000-May 2002: I worked with Wei Zheng at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Astrophysical Sciences. Correlating catalogs from the Chandra Deep Field South and ESO imaging surveys, we obtained optical, IR, and x-ray photometry with which we hope to select and analyze the most distant galaxies. Most of our sources are galaxies, star burst, or AGN and using the SED fitting method, we hope to obtain photometric redshifts. We use spectroscopic redshifts to test our procedures on the more exotic objects. The results are detailed in my senior thesis, Chandra Deep Field South: Colors and Redshifts. Recently, an extension of this work and the catalog was published. Zheng et al. 2004ApJS 155, 73.

   Summer 2001: I participated in Kitt Peak National Observatory REU program. There, I worked with Buell Jannuzi and Michael Brown to assess the suitability and limitations of using multi-band photometry to separate stars, galaxies, and AGN by color and to obtain reasonable photometric redshift estimates for galaxies by applying existing photo-z codes to our image catalogs. The techniques developed will be applied to the NOAO Deep Wide-Field Survey catalogs. The photometric method was detailed in a AAS poster 2001AAS...19912302M. The resulting catalog has been used in several papers.

   Summer 1999: I interned at the Space Telescope Science Institute working first with John MacKenty and the with Sally Oey. For John MacKenty, my work focused primarily on assessing the instrument capabilities of the proposed NGST-MOS. For Sally Oey, I performed an analysis of the diameter distribution function of HII regions in local galaxies, testing the possibility of a 2-power law description of the diameter distribution that would correlate with a similar description of the luminosity function. This work is included in Oey, Parker, Mikles, & Zhang. 2003 ApJ, 126,2317.