Prize Recipient


Recipient Picture

Anne Archibald
McGill University

Citation:

"The End of Accretion: The X-ray Binary/Millisecond Pulsar Transition Object PSR J1023+0038"

Background:

Anne Archibald received her undergraduate degree from the University of Waterloo, where her studies were in pure and applied mathematics and included co-op work terms analyzing radar imaging data, implementing a commercial ray-tracer, and writing code for the symbolic-computation package Maple. Her master's work was in algebraic geometry and number theory at McGill University, culminating in her thesis "Intersection Theory on Surfaces". She transferred to a doctoral program in physics with Victoria Kaspi at McGill, carrying out surveys and multiwavelength studies of pulsars. Her doctoral thesis, "The End of Accretion: The X-ray Binary/Millisecond Pulsar Transition Object PSR J1023+0038," was an intensive study of a particular pulsar system that had recently undergone accretion. Since the thesis was submitted, the system has begun accreting, and she has continued to study it in detail, applying what was learned in the pulsar state to understand the unusual accretion flow. Moreover, there are now two other objects known to undergo such transitions, and they appear to form a new class sharing key observational properties. After her PhD, she began postdoctoral research at the Dutch radio astronomy institute ASTRON, and was awarded a Veni fellowship to continue studying these transitional millisecond pulsars.