Professor Tomasz Bulik

Research

Biography:       

Professor Bulik is an astrophysicist, leader of the Seismic Sensors group at Astrocent. He is also a professor at the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Warsaw.

He graduated from the Department of Physics in Warsaw in 1988, and then obtained his PhD at the Pennsylvania State University in 1993. He spent the following three years at the Enrico Fermi Institute at The University of Chicago. In 1996 he moved back to Poland to take a post at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center in Warsaw. Since 2005 he has been employed at the University of Warsaw. During his career he worked on subjects in theoretical astrophysics, such as investigations of X-ray binaries, physics of strong magnetic fields, the origin of gamma ray bursts, structure and properties of neutron stars. He initiated the work on binary population synthesis, a topic that led to interest in gravitational wave astrophysics.   The effort done in collaboration with his former student and now coworker prof. Belczynski resulted in prediction that the most prominent sources of gravitational waves are binary black holes, which has recently been confirmed by LIGO. He is member of the VIRGO collaboration and he has participated in the discoveries of gravitational wave sources.  He is also a member of the high energy gamma ray experiment H.E.S.S.

Professor Bulik was the leader of the site search and characterization campaign  for CTA. He is also involved the preparation of the next generation gravitational wave observatory – the Einstein Telescope. Currently he is working on properties of binary gravitational wave sources and also on reduction of low frequency noise in the VIRGO detector.

Main scientific interests

The scientific interests of prof Bulik concentrate on relativistic astrophysics, but also include such areas as site testing, sensor construction and deployment. On the theory side he works on binary star evolution, structure and properties of compact objects, high energy emission from astrophysical sources, and population of compact object binaries. Additionally, his interests lie in construction and deployment of ultrasensitive sensors aiding detection of gravitational waves.

He has co-authored over 380papers in refereed journals.

Recent grants:

• TEAM – “Advanced algorithms for Newtonian noise cancellation in ground base gravitational wave detectors”, 11/2017-11-2020. Source of funding :  Foundation for Polish Science (FNP) 2017-2020
• International Research Agenda grant  “AstroCeNT: Particle Astrophysics Science and Technology Centre”, source: Foundation for Polish Science (FNP), 2018/07 – 2023/05

Degrees and titles