Lindsay Glesener

Lindsay Glesener

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Tate Hall, Office 262
Assistant Professor, School of Physics and Astronomy and Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics

I am a solar astrophysicist, concentrating on the Sun’s remarkable capabilities for accelerating particles. Solar flares and coronal mass ejections transform huge amounts of energy from the coronal magnetic fields into particle energy through processes that are not yet understood. We attempt to evaluate and explain these phenomena by examining the high­-energy emission from flares, all the way from large eruptive flares down to small, prevalent, unresolved ones.

Investigating these issues requires remote-sensing instruments at high energies (X-rays and gamma rays). Recovering images and spectra for astrophysical sources requires the estimation of source parameters given measured data influenced by instrumental characteristics. While always a challenge for any telescope, these inverse problems are especially complex for high-energy X-ray and gamma ray instruments, where indirect imaging techniques are often necessary.