Dr Patrick Reichherzer

Dr Patrick Reichherzer is a postdoctoral Walter Benjamin fellow in the Laboratory Astroparticle and the Plasma Theory group at the University of Oxford. He completed undergraduate studies at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany, 2016) and Masters studies at Ruhr University Bochum (Germany, 2018), for which he won the Master's thesis prize. He completed his joint PhD in Astronomy at Ruhr University Bochum and Paris-Saclay University with distinction (2022). In his thesis, he quantified the influence of propagation effects of cosmic messengers on observable multi-messenger signatures of the transient universe [1-4]. These findings highlight the need for further improved, coordinated multi-messenger observation campaigns to unravel the nature of extreme transient astrophysical events. To this end, Dr Patrick Reichherzer developed the holistic platform Astro-COLIBRI [5,6] as one step in this direction.

The key objective of his research in Oxford is to investigate the signatures of the interplay between magnetised, turbulent plasmas and cosmic rays (CRs). What can they tell us about the origin of CRs? His latest research using large-scale simulations and ML-driven analysis, submitted to Nature Astronomy, challenges current understanding of CR confinement, proposing a crucial role for previously overlooked microscale physics.

1. Reichherzer, P., Becker Tjus, J., Zweibel, E. G., Merten, L., and Pueschel, M. J., “Turbulence-level dependence of cosmic ray parallel diffusion”, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol. 498, no. 4, pp. 5051–5064, 2020. doi:10.1093/mnras/staa2533.
2. Reichherzer, P., Merten, L., Dörner, J., Becker Tjus, J., Pueschel, M. J., and Zweibel, E. G., “Regimes of cosmic-ray diffusion in Galactic turbulence”, SN Applied Sciences, vol. 4, 2022. doi:10.1007/s42452-021-04891-z.
3. Reichherzer, P. and Becker Tjus, J., “PropPy - Correlated random walk propagation of cosmic rays in magnetic turbulence”, The Journal of Open Source Software, vol. 7, no. 74, 2022. doi:10.21105/joss.04243.
4. Reichherzer, P., et al., “Anisotropic cosmic ray diffusion in isotropic Kolmogorov turbulence”, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol. 514, no. 2, pp. 2658–2666, 2022. doi:10.1093/mnras/stac1408.
5. Reichherzer, P. et al., “Astro-COLIBRI-The COincidence LIBrary for Real-time Inquiry for Multimessenger Astrophysics”, The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, vol. 256, no. 1, 2021. doi:10.3847/1538-4365/ac1517.
6. Reichherzer, P. et al., “Astro-COLIBRI 2—An Advanced Platform for Real-Time Multi-Messenger Discoveries”, Galaxies, vol. 11, no. 1, p. 22, 2023. doi:10.3390/galaxies11010022