Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing |
Optimization of an Airglow Filter for the distant Universe
Supervisor:Prof. Karl Glazebrook
Suitable year level:4th or 5th year
Project Description
A fundamental problem in cosmology is the difficulty of observing the
most distant galaxies due to the glow of the Earth's own atmosphere.
The earliest galaxies formed < 1 billion years after the Big Bang and are
in principle observable in the near-infrared, except they are so incredibly
faint they can not be detected with existing technology.
I have an on-going project to build an infrared 'airglow filter'. Because
the air glow is distributed in a pattern of wavelength (narrow spectroscopic
emission lines) it is possible in principle to filter these out and make
telescopes up to 25x more powerful. But this has not yet been achieved
in practice.
An interesting sub-problem is the best design of filter. I have a design for
a preliminary filter based on a simple algorithm for blocking lines, but
is there a better design which can achieve superior performance at
say a fixed manufacturing cost? Every time you block a line there is a
quantifiable cost. The project is to find more optimal designs, if they exist.
Expectations/Assessment
The outcome of the project should be a small program, written in
any reasonably portable computer language, to investigate this optimization
problem, together with a technical report.
Pre-requisite Knowledge
Programming ability, some basic knowledge of optimization techniques would
be an advantage.
Further details:karl @ astro.swin.edu.au (9214 4384)
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