I'm a third-year physics PhD student at MIT. I am fortunate to be advised by Erin Kara and work closely with Kevin Burdge and Riccardo Arcodia.
I was an undergrad at Columbia, where I worked with Frits Paerels on X-ray astronomy and David Kipping on extrasolar planets, graduating in 2022. Before that, I grew up in Edison, New Jersey.
This website was last updated in March 2025.
e-mail: joheen (at) mit (dot) edu
Research Interests:
My research is in high-energy astrophysics, which provides unique and exciting laboratories mediated by strong gravity, plasma physics, and atomic physics. I broadly study compact object accretion and binaries by drawing upon insights from those areas. I am especially interested in electromagnetic counterparts of (~millihertz) gravitational wave sources. Currently, I'm working on:
-Quasi-Periodic Eruptions (QPEs), a newly discovered type of recurring X-ray transient which may be the first-known electromagnetic counterparts to EMRIs. An enticing possibility is using them to map general relativistic precession effects within ~hundreds of gravitational radii of supermassive black holes. Here are some animations illustrating the timing modulation effects of accretion disk nodal precession and EMRI apsidal precession (the "Q" in QPE).
-Ultracompact binaries, which are the dominant low-frequency (mHz) gravitational wave sources in the Galaxy. They will allow uniquely the multi-messenger ("messengers" = electromagnetic and gravitational waves) study of accretion disks.
-Tidal Disruption Events, which are ideal laboratories to study rapid accretion and turbulence under strong gravity.
-X-ray astronomy, high performance computing, large-scale data analysis. I am also a member of the NICER science team.
Selected Publications:
Discovery of Quasi-periodic Eruptions in the Tidal Disruption Event and Extreme Coronal Line Emitter AT2022upj: implications for the QPE/TDE fraction and a connection to ECLEs
Joheen Chakraborty, Erin Kara, Riccardo Arcodia, Johannes Buchner, et al.
Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2025
[arXiv]
[ADS]
[Summary]
Expanding the ultracompacts: gravitational wave-driven mass transfer in the shortest-period binaries with accretion disks
Joheen Chakraborty, Kevin Burdge, Saul Rappaport, James Munday, et al.
Astrophysical Journal, Dec. 2024
[arXiv]
[ADS]
Testing EMRI models for Quasi-periodic Eruptions with 3.5 years of monitoring eRO-QPE1
Joheen Chakraborty, Riccardo Arcodia, Erin Kara, Giovanni Miniutti, Margherita Giustini, et al.
Astrophysical Journal, Apr. 2024
[arXiv]
[ADS]
[Talk]
[Summary]
Possible X-ray Quasi-periodic Eruptions in a tidal disruption event candidate
Joheen Chakraborty, Erin Kara, Megan Masterson, Margherita Giustini, Giovanni Miniutti, Richard Saxton
Astrophysical Journal Letters, Nov. 2021
[arXiv]
[ADS]
[Talk]
[Press]
You can find my first-/second-author papers here, and all papers I've been on here. (arXiv version)
