Lia Hankla
Affiliated Scientist
I am interested in anything and everything involving plasmas and black holes, especially accretion disks and their surrounding coronae. Although the plasmas just outside the event horizon hold the key to unraveling how black holes and their surroundings evolve and emit light, they remain poorly understood because of the difficulty connecting small-scale particle processes to the global scales of the entire accretion disk and corona. In particular, interpreting observations of radio to X-ray emission from around black holes requires understanding how and where magnetic energy converts into heat, large-scale kinetic energy, and plasma particle energy. To address these challenges, I use whatever tool is most appropriate for the situation, be it General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulations of an accretion disk, particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of small-scale plasma physics, or (semi-)analytic models.