"Lyapunov Exponents to Test General Relativity" PDF
Alex Deich, Nicolás Yunes, Charles Gammie
2023
"Accuracy of the slow-rotation approximation for black holes in modified gravity in light of astrophysical observables" PDF
Pablo Cano & Alex Deich, Nicolás Yunes
2023
"A Tiny Needle in a Messy Haystack: Chaos in Quadratic Gravity" PDF
Alex Deich, Alejandro Cárdenas-Avendaño, Nicolás Yunes
2022
"Transgenic Mouse Facial Nerve Model of Synkinesis"
Mostafa M Ahmed, Alex Deich, et al.
2020
"Automating the Swift Scheduling Pipeline"
A. Deich, J. Gropp, S. LaPorte, A. Tohuvavohu
Conference paper, presented at SPIE July 2018
"Off-axis emission of short gamma-ray bursts and the detectability of
electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational-wave-detected binary mergers" PDF
D. Lazzati, A. Deich, B. Morsony, J. Workman.
MNRAS, 471, 2, October 2017
Self-Consistent Theory of Sandwich Identification PDF
Twitter user @Phosphatide posted a model of how to
distinguish if a given food is a sandwich or a taco or burrito based on where the starch is. I formalize this model as a Hilbert space with the appropriate symmetries to apply the structure of spinors.
How Deep Can You Swim and Still Fart? PDF
The deeper you swim, the higher the ambient water pressure.
When does that equal the pressure of a fart?
How Can Feet Make an Earthquake? jupyter notebook
Why do millions of randomly stomping feet make an earthquake instead of
generally canceling out? There's a nice answer to this that I explore
in this Jupyter notebook.
Aphysical Extensions of the Coin Flipping Problem PDF
How can you predict which side a coin will land on, given the initial
conditions on its velocity and angular speed? In this write-up I consider
aphysical extensions of this old problem.
Annotated solution manual to the 2001 Physics GRE
PDF
As a way to study for the GRE myself, I wrote a solution guide with full solutions to
the 2001 GRE made available by ETS. The guide solves and discusses every problem.
It also contains a formula sheet and explores test-taking strategies.
I'm a graduate student in the physics department at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where my work focuses on gravity and black holes. Lately, I have been using techniques from chaos theory to find new ways of classifying the motion of particles in extreme gravitational environments.
I graduated from Reed College in 2016, and afterwards worked at Oregon State University, where I worked on modeling the emission from off-axis gamma ray bursts. Following this, I worked for the Swift space telescope where I focused on automating the mission planning software.
From time to time, I come upon a small problem I find some delight in. This usually results in a light-hearted piece of writing, which I often post here.
A lot of my work has concerned simulation of orbital systems, so I made a naïve one to decorate the background of my website. Pictured are 5,000 particles orbiting a central body with a simple Newtonian gravitational force.
Reloading the website will reveal other initial conditions, each showing a simulacrum of one of three galaxy morphologies: Shell, ring, and spiral. It should be noted that these are mostly aesthetic— Spirals, in particular, are governed by complex N-body dynamics, which are not reproduced here. As a result, the spiral structures will dissipate after a few orbits. Try clicking on the particles and see what happens.