NASA Postdoctoral Program: Astrophysics: X-Ray Polarimetry

The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects at a NASA Center, NASA Headquarters, or at a NASA-affiliated research institute. These one- to three-year fellowships are competitive and are designed to advance NASA's missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology. This specific opportunity focuses on X-ray polarimetry research, studying X-rays from astrophysical sources that have some degree of polarization dependent on emission mechanism and source geometry. The research involves developing gas micro-pattern detectors for SMEX or MIDEX missions to measure polarization from X-ray sources, studying large-area pixelized gas well detectors for polarization measurements up to 300 MeV, and developing a balloon-borne Compton scattering instrument for time-resolved polarization measurements in the 30-200 keV range. Research opportunities exist both on detector development and astrophysical source models, with specific focus on structure of supernova remnants, active galactic nuclei, stellar black holes, and high magnetic field neutron star X-ray sources.