She Blinded Me With...

 Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institute of Washington (in Pasadena, obviously). Received my PhD from UC San Diego in 1998 and my B.A. from Princeton in 1993; both in Physics. Astronomy is the order of the day, but with as severe a Physics bent as I can get away with.

This page describes the major research projects that are currently in my hopper ("Oh baby, I've got a hopper!" - Cosmo K.). You can follow the links to more information and papers and so on...
Q0201+36

Damped Lya Systems

Damped Lya research is my real bread and butter. My entire PhD thesis was devoted to these high redshift protogalaxies and I have spent plenty of time since pursuing them. My interests include studying their kinematic properties, metallicities, abundance patterns, and their associated stellar systems.


LL System

Lyman Limit Systems

The Lyman limit systems aren't a far cry away from the damped systems. In fact, one could argue that the damped systems are simply a subset of the LL systems. Nonetheless, I have dabbled in estimating abundances for a few LL systems and am gearing up to measure the kinematic properties of a large sample.


The Sun

Stellar Abundances

When one plays with an echelle and is constantly thinking about abundances, stars aren't far away. My main focus thus far has been determining stellar abundances for the Galactic thick disk stars.


FGC 596

Thick Disk Imaging

As far as observing at LCO goes, my main program has been to search for the thick disk component in edge-on spiral galaxies. It'd be quite exciting if a large fraction of spiral galaxies exhibit this fourth stellar population. Lots of data so far, not much analysis...


Nbody Simulation

Cosmological Simulations

I've had a great interest in Nbody codes for quite some time now. As a graduate student, I had hope to get involved with some cosmological simulations, alas there was no one to really work with. Almost set up a collaboration with J. Navarro on the damped systems, but my guess is that I was a little late showing up to the dinner table. A Ue-Li Pen visit in 1997 to UCSD started me off in the game. Am burning NCSA supercomputing time as I type...






Fine Structure Evolution

Does the fine structure constant really evolve?! My first project as a grad student was to investigate an evolution in the fine structure constant by analyzing C~IV lines measured with HIRES. Songaila and company beat me to the punch and I have been struggling to catch up ever since...


BBN

Deuterium

 For the most part, I have been little more than a curious spectator in the D/H game. Of course, you learn a lot when your good buddy is Scott "Zorak" Burles and the Tytler "army" surrounds your office. Am actually dabbling in the business a little these days in collaboration with J. Omeara and D. Tytler. Results to follow..

Carnegie Observatories
813 Santa Barbara St.
Pasadena, CA 91101
Phone: 626/304-0239; Fax: 626/795-8136;
e-mail: xavier@ociw.edu
modified 3/10/00