Portrait of Lia Hankla

Lia Hankla

Post-Doctoral Associate

I am interested in anything and everything involving plasmas and black holes, especially accretion disks and their surrounding coronae. Although the plasmas just outside the event horizon hold the key to unraveling how black holes and their surroundings evolve and emit light, they remain poorly understood because of the difficulty connecting small-scale particle processes to the global scales of the entire accretion disk and corona. In particular, interpreting observations of radio to X-ray emission from around black holes requires understanding how and where magnetic energy converts into heat, large-scale kinetic energy, and plasma particle energy. To address these challenges, I use whatever tool is most appropriate for the situation, be it General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulations of an accretion disk, particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of small-scale plasma physics, or (semi-)analytic models.
Research Centers & Collaborations: Joint Space-Science Institute
Facilities:
Supercomputing

Latest Papers

The inner structure and thermodynamics of thin accretion discs

| Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
UMD Author(s): Lia Hankla


Late-time Radio Brightening and Emergence of a Radio Jet in the Changing-look AGN 1ES 1927+654

| The Astrophysical Journal Letters
UMD Author(s): Lia Hankla


Kinetic simulations of imbalanced turbulence in a relativistic plasma: Net flow and particle acceleration

| Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
UMD Author(s): Lia Hankla


Kinetic Simulations of Imbalanced Turbulence in a Relativistically-hot Plasma

| APS Division of Plasma Physics Meeting Abstracts
UMD Author(s): Lia Hankla


Local Simulations of Heating Torques on a Luminous Body in an Accretion Disk

| The Astrophysical Journal
UMD Author(s): Lia Hankla


Kinetic Simulations of Relativistic Imbalanced Turbulence

| APS Division of Plasma Physics Meeting Abstracts
UMD Author(s): Lia Hankla