Eleonora Veronica Lai

Eleonora Veronica Lai is a Ph.D candidate at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center (CAMK) in Warsaw.

The supervisor of her doctoral work is Dr. Barbara De Marco, who is affiliated at the moment with the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona (Spain). Her mentor at the CAMK is Prof. Agata Rożańska.

Her Ph.D. work is focused on studying the stellar wind in High Mass X-ray Binaries and the particular case of Cyg X-1. Black holes such as Cyg X-1 accrete via the stellar wind of the supergiant companion star with spectral class O or B. However, the inhomogeneous stellar wind affects the properties of the source causing variable and partial absorption of the X-ray emission. In her dissertation, Eleonora Veronica will show how the stellar wind strongly changes not only the intrinsic spectral properties but also the short timescale variability and the spectral-timing properties for Cyg X-1 in its hard state. Moreover, she will constrain the properties of the stellar wind building colour-colour diagram models. Her work will be crucial to deeply comprehend the accretion process in these kinds of systems and better understand the structure of the stellar wind.

Eleonora Veronica is partially supported by the Polish National Science Center working in the OPUS project (2021/41/B/ST9/04110), "X-ray fingerprints of accreting compact objects", whose PI is Prof. Agata Rożańska.

In 2022, she also won the 3rd Visitors call in the "Activities in the High-Energy Astrophysics Domain (AHEAD2020)'' project funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Programme (grant agreement n. 871158) coordinated by the National Institute for Astrophysics (Italy).

Research interests

• X-ray Binaries, particularly the study of the accretion process around black holes and neutron stars, not only in Low Mass X-ray Binaries, but specifically in High Mass X-ray Binaries where accretion takes place thanks to the presence of the stellar wind of the massive companion star,
• timing, spectral and spectral-timing analysis applied to the above-mentioned systems.

Titles and degrees

• Master of Science in Physics, Faculty of Physics, University of Cagliari, Sardinia (Italy). Dissertation title: "Timing Analysis of the accreting millisecond pulsar IGR J17511-3057",
• Bachelor of Science in Physics, Faculty of Physics, University of Cagliari, Sardinia (Italy). Dissertation title: "Recent results on proton radius measurements".