2008 April 3
Haven’t gotten much done in the past few days with seeing the Red Sox play, hosting another prospective grad student, and feeling a little sick. After discussions with Eliot and Geoff, it looks like I need to investigate whether thermal radio emission (AKA free-free AKA der bremsstrahlung) will make it more difficult for us to detect the signal that we’re looking for. Unfortunately, at the moment it looks like the answer is “yes”, although I think I’ve figured out how to minimize its impact.
Anyway, quantifying this actually involves doing some formal analysis, taking derivatives and things. A Fisher matrix seems to be the tool that I want. It’d be kind of fun to do something a little different like this for a bit, but there’s really no need to spend much time on this if I can figure out what I need to figure out. So I’ll probably do some quick and dirty numerical stuff and call it a day.