EDUCATION:

Ph.D. 1983, Columbia University
B.A. 1977, Cornell University

RESEARCH:

My research involves the development of novel instrumentation and experiments for balloon-borne and satellite-borne missions to investigate a variety of astrophysical problems.

Using a novel approach to fabricating X-ray optics pioneered at Columbia, we built and calibrated the hard X-ray telescopes for the NASA NuSTAR mission.  NuSTAR is the first high energy astrophysics mission to utilize focusing hard X-ray optics in the 10-80 keV energy band, and this will provide 100 times better sensitivity than previous missions. NuSTAR was launched in June 2012. My group is heavily involved in the galactic plane survey. Our research includes studying objects near the galactic center, including the supermassive black hole it contains; studying the origin of the galactic diffuse X-ray background; studying X-ray emission from molecular clouds and conducting a survey of a wide swath near the galactic center to determine what types of objects it contains. We are also studying non-thermal X-ray emission from supernovae and pulsar wind nebulae, to better understand particle transport and particle acceleration in these objects. We also study radioactive 44Ti emission from young supernovae to challenge theories of supernova explosion physics and explosive nucleosynthesis.
 
We are also involved in particle astrophysics, in particular a balloon-borne experiment to hunt for dark matter.  The General Antiparticle Spectrometer Experiment (GAPS) will search for cosmic antideuterons. Many beyond-the Standard-Model theories postulate weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS) that can annihilate in WIMP-WIMP interactions in the galactic halo. The antideuterons are produced as a rare byproduct of these annihilations, and potentially offer a smoking gun signature of dark matter. In many beyond-the-Standard-Model theories, antideuteron searches offer the most sensitive means to detect dark matter.  GAPS uses a novel scheme to detect antimatter through identification of atomic deexcitation X-rays and particles produced when antimatter is captured in an atom and subsequently annihilates in the nucleus.   GAPS requires the development of a novel pixellated Si(Li) detector, and this development is currently underway at Columbia. A prototype experiment was successfully flow from Hokkaido, Japan in June 2012, and we are working on the design of a major experiment to be flown from Antarctica in late 2016.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

T. Aramaki, S.K. Chan, C.J. Hailey, P.A. Kaplan, T. Krings, N. Madden, D. Protic and C. Ross, “Development of large format Si(Li) detectors for the GAPS dark matter experiment,” Nucl. Instr. Meth. (A), 682, 90-96, 2012.

C. J. Hailey et. al., “Antideuteron-based dark matter search with GAPS: Current progress and future prospects,” Advances in Space Research (in press), 2012.

J. Koglin, C.J. Hailey et. al., “First results from the ground calibration of the NuSTAR flight optics,” Proc. SPIE vol. 8147, O’dell and Pareschi eds., “Optics for EUV, X-ray and Gamma-ray Astronomy, 2011.

C.J. Hailey, H-J An, K.L. Blaedel, N.F. Brejnholt, F.E. Christensen, W.W. Craig, T.A. Decker, M. Doll, J. Gum, J.E. Koglin, C.P. Jensen, L. Hale, K. Mori, M.J. Pivovaroff, M. Sharpe, M. Stern, G. Tajiri and W.W. Zhang, “The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR): Optics Overview and Current Status”, Proc. SPIE 7732, 28, 2010.

C.J. Hailey, “An Indirect Search for Dark Matter Using Antideuterons: the GAPS Experiment”, New Journal of Physics, vol.11, 105022, 2009.

C.J. Hailey, T. Aramaki, W.W. Craig, F. Gahbauer, J.E. Koglin, L. Fabris, N. Madden, K. Mori, H.T. Yu and K.P. Ziock, “Accelerator Testing of the General Antiparticle Spectrometer, a Novel Approach to Indirect Dark Matter Detection,” Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, JCAP01, 007, 2006

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