Biography
My colleagues and I are endeavoring to build an astronomical observatory at Dome A, the highest point in Antarctica. We hope to set up several telescopes in the coming years to study the mysterious dark energy in the universe. My research interests include spectropolarimetry observations of supernovae. The supernovae I study are so far away that even the largest telescopes in the world cannot resolve their shapes through direct imaging. Spectropolarimetry is a technique that enables geometric structures of supernovae to be studied. I am also doing research on machine learning enabled studies of large astronomical data sets and am a member of the TAMIDS Scientific Machine Learning Lab. I lead the DECam Search for Intermediate Redshift Transients (DESIRT), which uses DECam to find transients and DESI to carry out spectral follow-ups. Most excitingly, I am working on finding high redshift transients using the JWST. We expect new, exciting data to become available very soon!
Selected Publications
Jiawen Yang, Lifan Wang, Nicholas Suntzeff, Lei Hu, Lauren Aldoroty, Peter J. Brown, Kevin Krisciunas, Iair Arcavi, Jamison Burke, Lluís Galbany, Daichi Hiramatsu, Griffin Hosseinzadeh, D. Andrew Howell, Curtis McCully, Craig Pellegrino, and Stefano Valenti. “Using 1991T/1999aa-like Type Ia Supernovae as Standardizable Candles.” The Astrophysical Journal, 938(1), 83, Oct 2022.
Yi Yang, Huirong Yan, Lifan Wang, J. Craig Wheeler, Dietrich Baade, Howard Isaacson, Aleksandar Cikota, Justyn R. Maund, Peter Hoeflich, Ferdinando Patat, Steven Giacalone, Malena Rice, Dakotah B. Tyler, Divya Mishra, Chris Ashall, Thomas G. Brink, Alexei V. Filippenko, Llíus Galbany, Kishore C. Patra, Melissa Shahbandeh, Sergiy S. Vasylyev, and Jozsef Vinkó. “Spectropolarimetry of the Thermonuclear Supernova SN 2021rhu: High Calcium Polarization 79 Days after Peak Luminosity.” The Astrophysical Journal, 939(1), 18, Oct 2022.
Lei Hu, Xingzhuo Chen, and Lifan Wang. “Spectroscopic Studies of Type Ia Supernovae Using LSTM Neural Networks.” The Astrophysical Journal, 930(1), 70, May 2022.
Maokai Hu, Lifan Wang, and Xiaofeng Wang. “The Effects of Circumstellar Dust Scattering on the Light Curves and Polarizations of Type Ia Supernovae.” The Astrophysical Journal, 931(2), 110, Jun 2022.
Lei Hu, Xingzhuo Chen, and Lifan Wang. “Spectroscopic Studies of Type Ia Supernovae Using LSTM Neural Networks.” ApJ, TBD, 2022.
Jiachen Ding, Lifan Wang, Peter Brown, and Ping Yang. “Radiative Transfer Modeling of an SN 1987A Light EchoAT 2019xis.” The Astrophysical Journal, 919(2), 104, Sep 2021.
Matthew R Chu, Aleksandar Cikota, Dietrich Baade, Ferdinando Patat, Alexei V Filippenko, J Craig Wheeler, Justyn Maund, Mattia Bulla, Yi Yang, Peter Höflich, and Lifan Wang. “An imaging polarimetry survey of Type Ia supernovae: are peculiar extinction and polarization properties produced by circumstellar or interstellar matter?.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 509(4), 6028--6046, Nov 2021.
Xingzhuo Chen, Lei Hu, and Lifan Wang. “Constraining Type Ia Supernova Delay Time with Spatially Resolved Star Formation Histories.” The Astrophysical Journal, 922(1), 15, Nov 2021.
Qinan Wang, et al. “SN 2018agk: A Prototypical Type Ia Supernova with a Smooth Power-law Rise in Kepler (K2).” The Astrophysical Journal, 923(2), 167, Dec 2021.
M. A. Kenworthy, et al. “The \(\beta\) Pictoris b Hill sphere transit campaign.” Astronomy & Astrophysics, 648, A15, Apr 2021.
