Thesis

When a star ventures too close to a supermassive black hole, it is torn apart by tidal forces in a tidal disruption event (TDE). These rare flares reveal otherwise dormant black holes and may launch relativistic jets that accelerate particles to extreme energies, yet no TeV gamma-ray emission from a TDE has been detected so far. The Rubin Observatory (LSST) will discover thousands of TDEs, provided they are identified early among millions of nightly alerts and followed up quickly.

This PhD builds on our group’s TRACER project and will develop the gamma-ray branch of this chain. The student will integrate the TDE candidates classified by the Fink broker into the Astro-COLIBRI platform (web and smartphone apps) and select those most promising for very-high-energy emission. The student will then trigger and analyse observations with H.E.S.S. and, later, CTAO, complemented by X-ray and radio data. In parallel, the student will explore a link to the future gravitational-wave observatory LISA, in particular extreme-mass-ratio inspirals (stellar-mass compact objects spiralling into massive black holes) in galactic nuclei. This involves studying TDE@LISA observability and defining how LISA alerts (timescales, thresholds, localisation) could be distributed through Astro-COLIBRI. Expected results are a working alert-to-observation pipeline, the first systematic gamma-ray detections or constraints on particle acceleration in TDEs, a contribution to the CTAO TDE science programme, and a prototype of LISA alert handling.