Peter Becker

Contact Info

I received my doctorate in Astrophysics from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1987, working under the supervision of Dr. Mitchell C. Begelman at the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences. From 1987 to 1989, I held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Astronomy at the University of Virginia, and during 1989-1992, I was an NRC/NAS Cooperative Research Associate at the Space Science Division of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. Since 1992, I have been a faculty member at George Mason University. I am affiliated with the School of Physics, Astronomy, & Computational Sciences in the College of Science.

My research interests include a variety of topics in theoretical astrophysics, mathematical physics, and numerical analysis:

Structure and observable properties of accretion columns in X-ray pulsars.
Production of radio emission in solar noise storms.
Time-dependent models for particle acceleration in astrophysical plasmas.
Thermal and bulk Comptonization in accretion flows onto compact objects.
Radiation-dominated shock waves in astrophysical sources.
Particle acceleration and the production of outflows from accretion disks around black holes.
Stability and structure of cosmic-ray modified shock waves produced by supernova explosions.
Production of radio emission in cooling-flow clusters of galaxies.
Attenuation of gamma-rays via photon-photon collisions in compact sources.
Effects of general relativity on the propagation of particles near rotating black holes.
Properties of solutions to Heun's and Whittaker's differential equations, including normalization integrals.
Large-scale automated symbolic computational methods for solving integro-partial differential equations.
I am currently working with CSI doctoral students Juan Luna and Ken Wolfram.
I also continue to collaborate with my former students, Dr. Truong Le, who holds an NRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, and Dr. Prasad Subramanian, who is now an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in Bangalore, India.