진학프로석·박사 채용 접수 플랫폼

Level and duration: PhD. Salary depends on experience. Preferred experience level is from Thesis+2 to Thesis+9, but all applications will be considered. Two years (1 year renewable). Field: Astrophysics; Data Processing and Model Fitting; Active Galactic Nuclei; High Angular Resolution, Optical Interferometry. Working place: Main: Laboratoire Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Parc Valrose, 06000 Nice, France. Occasional: Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, 96 Bd de L’Observatoire, 06300 Nice, France. Observing runs at ESO Paranal Observatory in Chile are probable. Host Institute and Teams Laboratoire Joseph-Louis Lagrange (https://lagrange.oca.eu/fr/accueil-lagrange) is a joint research unit of Côte d’Azur University, Côte d’Azur Observatory and CNRS (the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). It has teams in Galaxies and Cosmology (G&C), Instrumental Astrophysics (MPO), Stellar and solar Physics, Signal and Image processing (Signal), Theory and Observation in Planetology (TOP) and Turbulence, Fluids and Plasma. It is the birthplace and remains a world leader in multi telescopes optical interferometry with the PI ship of the VLTI instruments AMBER and MATISSE and strong contributions to the VLTI upgrade GRAVITY+ and to the visitor VLTI instrument suite ASGARD. The fellowship would be in the MPO team, in relation with the MATISSE and GRAVITY international AGN science groups and with strong connections with G&C and possibly the Signal teams. The fellowship is funded by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche grant ANR-21-CE31-0011 (Multi Scale Multi Wavelength study of AGN) for the 1st year. A one year extension is foreseen, if both parties agree.

General science goal : Active Galactic Nuclei are a key component of Galactic evolution through AGN feedback. They are a tracer of the coevolution of super massive black holes (SMBH) and galaxies. They provide direct geometrical distance measurements that should eventually contribute to the Hubble tension discussion. Spectro Astrometry with GRAVITY and eventually ASGARD on the VLTI allows to resolve angularly Broad Line Region, at sub parsec scales, and provide model dependent dynamical measures of the SMBH mass. Combined with Reverberation Mapping linear size measures, angular spectro astrometric sizes provide a direct geometrical distance measurement sometimes called “BLR parallax”. MATISSE on the VLTI and the LBTI provide images of the AGN dust torus and dusty wind in the 1-10 pc range. Advanced Adaptive Optics Instruments on unit telescopes, such as ERIS on the VLT, provide images of the circumnuclear disk (CND) and shocks created by in- and outflowing material, in the 10-100 pc range. [Tapez ici] The SMBH mass and the distance estimates as well the study of AGN feedback require improved models and observations of the AGN through all these scales in a broad range of spectral bands and resolutions. The observational data for each of these instrumental techniques is affected by structures that can be only accurately analyzed at the different scales by the other instruments. Our general science goal is to study the interactions and the mutual observational constraints of BLR, torus and dusty wind, in- and outflows and the CND observed by differential interferometry1 in the emission lines, dust and dusty wind images in the K, L, M and N band continuum and larger scale images of CND, in- and outflows and shocks. This will improve our understanding of AGN feedback, the accuracy of our SMBH mass measures and hence our constraints on SMBH-galaxy coevolution and should eventually make our BLR parallax measures accurate enough to impact the Hubble tension problem. The instrumental context is unique with the nearly completed GRAVITY+ breakthrough in VLTI sensitivity, and hence number of AGN observable by optical interferometry, as well as the availability of the Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS) on the VLT UT4.