P. Arevalo is an associate professor for astronomy at Universidad de Valparaiso, and Investigadora Titular of the proposal. She obtained her PhD with magna cum laude distinction at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich in 2006, after which she held postdoc positions in the UK, Germany, China and Chile. She has established a new research group at Valparaiso, with two postdocs and one PhD student, which is dedicated to the study of accretion in nearby AGN and X-ray binaries using spectral and timing tools. She is an expert on accretion physics in general, and in particular on modeling techniques for the X-ray spectrum, which are essential both for NuSTAR and XMM-Newton. She recently obtained 200 ks of NuSTAR and 30 ks XMM-Newton observations as PI, which will be particularly valuable to study accretion physics at low accretion rates
Main Expertise
Patricia Arévalo is an expert on X-ray astronomy, employing data from NuSTAR, CHANDRA and the XMM-Newton satellite to probe the accretion processes in nearby AGN via timing variations and models of the X-ray spectrum. Combining and simultaneously fitting the X-ray data from different satellites, corresponding to hard and soft X-ray data, provides particularly powerful constraints on the corona.
- Investigating a fluctuating-accretion model for the spectral-timing properties of accreting black hole systems
- Discovery of multiple Lorentzian components in the X-ray timing properties of the Narrow Line Seyfert 1 Ark 564
- Correlated X-ray/optical variability in the quasar MR2251-178
- The 2-79 keV X-Ray Spectrum of the Circinus Galaxy with NuSTAR, XMM-Newton, and Chandra: A Fully Compton-thick Active Galactic Nucleus
- NuSTAR Spectroscopy of Multi-component X-Ray Reflection from NGC 1068