GRAVITY
RESEARCH
At UIUC, I work on gravity, gravitational waves, black holes, and superradiance!
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Fig. KDE of the birthplaces of stars between 0 and 25 Myr. Are they shaped like spiral arms?
EVOLUTION OF THE MILKY WAY
During a research stay at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), I studied the evolution of the Milky Way. The structure and evolution of the Milky Way are still under debate. Because the Sun is deeply embedded in the Galactic disk, it is difficult to decompose the actual spiral structure and, consequently, understand the galaxy's evolutionary history!
In this work, we used the positions and velocities of young stars from Gaia EDR3 and LAMOST DR6 to integrate them backward to find their orbits and birthplaces. With this information, we studied the structures in which they were born!
The second part of this project corresponds to the analysis of the temporal evolution of the vertical motion of the stars in the MW. Take a look at a research highlight here and the original paper here
From: Garzon, D. N., N. Frankel, E. Zari, M. Xiang, and H.-W. Rix, "The Age-dependent Vertical Actions of Young Stars in the Galaxy," Astrophys. J. 972, 155 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad61e8
BIG BANG NUCLEOSYNTHESIS IN HIGHER DIMENSIONAL SPACES
Within the first minutes of the evolution of the Universe, abundances of different elements were synthesized. These primordial abundances are sensitive to the Universe's expansion rate, which in this early epoch is affected by dark radiation. This dark radiation can be related to the appearance of an extra term, which decreases with the cosmic scale factor as a^(-4) in the Friedmann equation in brane universe cosmology!
In this small project, I studied a model of a "3-brane" space embedded in a higher-dimensional space. Later, I calculated the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis.
If you want to learn more about Higher Dimensional Spaces, check this reference!
Fig. Light-element abundances—Yp, D/H, and Li/H—are shown as functions of the baryon-to-photon ratio Eta. The red horizontal segments indicate the observational limits on primordial abundances. The green segments show the standard BBN results. The blue and black lines show the BBN results. The vertical gray line shows the CMB constraint on Eta from Planck.
LIST OF PAPERS
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Garzon, D. N., Zhang, J., Kopteva, E. and Witek, H. (2026) ‘Charged black holes embedded in matter with anisotropic pressure: Horizon structure and quasinormal mode spectra’. arXiv:2607.05550.
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Haas, R. et al. (2024) The Einstein Toolkit, version “The Annie Jump Cannon release, ET_2024_11”. Zenodo.
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Garzon, D. N., Frankel, N., Zari, E., Xiang, M. and Rix, H.-W. (2024) ‘The age-dependent vertical actions of young stars in the Galaxy’, The Astrophysical Journal, 972(1), 155. arXiv:2407.07323.