Joheen Chakraborty

About Me

I’m a third-year PhD student at MIT working in high-energy astrophysics. My advisor is Erin Kara, and I also work closely with Kevin Burdge and Riccardo Arcodia.

I studied astrophysics and computer science as 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.

Research Interests

High-energy astrophysics provides unique laboratories to study systems mediated by strong gravity, plasma physics, and atomic physics; my research broadly studies compact object accretion and binaries to uncover insights in these areas. 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
• Ultracompact binaries, which are the dominant low-frequency (mHz) gravitational wave sources in the galaxy
• Tidal Disruption Events, which are exciting high-energy systems to probe rapid accretion under strong gravity
• High performance computing; large-scale data analysis; X-ray astronomy

Selected Publications

• 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]

• 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.
  Astrophyical Journal, Apr. 2024
  [arXiv] [ADS] [Talk] [Press]

• Transit Duration and Timing Variations from Binary Planets
  Joheen Chakraborty & David Kipping
  MNRAS, Feb. 2023.
  [arXiv] [ADS]

Website last updated April 2024.