Nicholas M. Law Dunlap Postdoctoral Fellow Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics University of Toronto email: law around di.utoronto.ca

 

I'm searching for planets, brown dwarfs and stellar companions around various types of (very) low mass stars. I'm also working on instrumentation projects including a new lost-cost robotic LGS adaptive optics system, and a (now-commissioned) 7-square-degree 100 megapixel camera for the Palomar 48-inch telescope. I have also led and worked on a variety of other projects. New: student projects!

Current Projects

	The Dunlap Institute Arctic Telescope (for which I am PI) is a wide field half-metre telescope designed to search for habitable transiting planets around cool stars. The system will operate in the high Canadian arctic, where 24-hour darkness will improve the survey's detection efficency by a large factor compared to mid-latitude sites. The Montreal Gazette recently published an article on our plans, and we recently published a paper partly using results from the telescope (which is currently undergoing testing in New Mexico).
	PTF/M-dwarfs is a new search for giant planets around M-dwarfs using data from the Palomar Transient Factory, as well as followup by other telescopes. I'm PI for the project, which took its first observations at the end of 2009 and involves teams from Caltech, LCOGT and Hawaii. So far we have observed over 100,000 M-dwarfs, with sensitivity to planetary transits around each one. A brief description of the project can be found in the PTF science cases paper, a recent poster from the Cool Stars conference is here, and the Cool Stars conference proceedings are here and here. A recent ApJ paper with the first results from the project is here.
	Robo-AO (formerly CAMERA) is a robotic laser guide star adaptive optics system designed for the Palomar 60-inch telescope. I'm Project Scientist for the system, and with colleagues and students designed and built the testbed optical system. The system is currently undergoing commissioning and I recently led its first science paper. Our SPIE paper has more details.
	As part of our Arctic site testing, I'm leading a wide-field camera project along with Ray Carlberg. Our survey, the first nighttime astronomical survey performed in the High Canadian Arctic, covered 500 square degrees in a variety of filters in Feburary 2012. An example image cut-out from the camera is here; our two cameras collected a total of 2TB of data (various papers are in preparation).
	The Palomar Transient Factory is a transient search using an 8-square-degree imager on the Palomar 48-inch telescope. I'm Project Scientist for the system, which has been running reliably since January 2009. PTF (PI: Shri Kulkarni) is a collaboration of over 70 people in many institutions. The system completed commissioning in summer 2009; a full description of the system is published in Law et al. 2009 (PASP 121.1395L). PTF has already found over a thousand extragalactic transients and discovered a whole new class of supernova!
	MAAPS, the M-dwarf Astrometric AO Planet Search, is a Palomar adaptive-optics astrometry program I'm leading. The search achieves 100-200 microarcsecond astrometric precision, sufficient to detect Jupiter-mass planets around mid-M-dwarfs.

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Other (selected) projects

	I was the PI for LAMP, LuckyCam on the 200-inch Palomar telescope. Using a combination of Adaptive Optics (AO) and Lucky Imaging we achieved the highest-resolution-ever images taken with visible light from the ground or space. The paper describing the results is here. The project was somehow named one of Time Magazine's best inventions of 2007.
	My PhD thesis research was on Lucky Imaging, the first system capable of reliably taking images with Hubble Space Telescope resolution from the ground using visible light and faint guide stars.

A PDF version of my CV is here.

A PDF version of my publication list is here.

Nicholas Law

Last updated December 2011