Chase was born and raised in Honolulu, O‘ahu, where he graduated from Iolani School in 2024. He is currently pursuing a double major in Physics and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is involved in on-campus organizations like Web Development at Berkeley, where he works on software development projects for clients, and Neurotech@Berkeley, where he works on research projects in neurotechnology. He is interested in working in scientific research and engineering at the intersection of physics, astrophysics, and computer science in the future.
Home Island: O‘ahu
High School: Iolani School
Institution when accepted: UC Berkeley
Site: Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, Pukalani, Maui
Mentors: Tom Schad & Alin Paraschiv
Project title: Developing a Forward Synthesis Model for Solar Coronal Radio Emission in Python
Project Abstract:
The Sun’s outer atmosphere, known as the solar corona, is dominated by magnetic fields that serve as the source of space weather events such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Space weather can severely disrupt communication networks and power grids on Earth, causing extensive satellite damage, radio blackouts, and air travel disruptions. Determining the physical properties of the solar corona, such as magnetic field, ion density, and temperature distributions, is therefore a crucial task for understanding and predicting space weather events long before they reach Earth. However, due to the corona’s optically thin nature, these physical properties are not directly observable from solar instruments. They must instead be inversely determined from observed signals through a technique called forward synthesis. In this project, we developed a model to forward synthesize the dominant forms of coronal radio emission through a synthetic solar atmosphere. We do this by simulating the interaction of particles throughout a model solar atmosphere to produce bremsstrahlung and gyroresonance radio emission, and then ray-tracing the absorption and emission mechanisms of those signals to the observer. As a result, several synthetic observables are generated, each representing a prediction of how solar radio signals would appear on Earth from a radio telescope. Because observed radio wave properties are physically dependent on the model parameters (density, temperature, and magnetic field distributions), comparison of the outputted synthetic images with actual observations can be used to fine-tune these initial parameters and improve our understanding of the physical processes operating within the corona.