Dr Richard Plotkin

I am a Senior Research Fellow and the Peter Curran Memorial Fellow at ICRAR-Curtin.  My research focuses on accreting black holes, where I use multiwavelength space- and ground-based observations to study acrcretion over the full range of black hole masses (from stellar to supermassive) and accretion rates (from quiescent to super-Eddington).   My main research goal is to better understand the structure/geometry of accretion flows (and their outflows) in different accretion regimes, in order to more effectively use radiation as a probe of Galactic and extragalactic black hole populations, and to learn how black holes may impact their large-scale environments.

My CV can be viewed here, and you can find my personal website at https://sites.google.com/site/richplotkin/

Background

I want to better understand how matter accretes onto black holes through accretion disks, the physical mechanisms that produce radiation at different wavebands, and how much energy accreting black holes can deposit into their environments (through jets and winds). I am especially interested in how the above properties change and evolve at different accretion rates.

I believe that the best way to gain a complete picture of black hole accretion is by piecing together clues from different types of black holes, and by looking across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.  Each type of black hole offers a unique view of the same basic phenomenology, often highlighting specific physical mechanism(s) that are difficult to isolate in other types of systems.

Research Topics

• black hole X-ray binaries
• ultraluminous X-ray sources
• relativistic jets
• active galactic nuclei
• quasar emission line regions
• blazars
• stellar populations in galaxies, from dwarfs to massive ellipticals.

Observations

I use observations from a wide variety of space- and ground-based telescopes.  I have been awarded telescope time (as principal investigator) on the following international facilities:

• Chandra X-ray Telescope (NASA; X-ray)
• Hubble Space Telescope (NASA; optical/ultraviolet)
• Very Large Telescope (European Southern Observatory; optical/near-infrared
• Very Large Array (National Radio Astronomy Observatory; radio)
• I also make use of large-scale surveys (like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey) to learn about the statistical properties of populations of accreting black holes.