Yasaman Homayouni

My name is Yasaman Homayouni and I am a PhD candidate in Dr. Trump research group. I am interested in highly accreting supermassive black holes at the center of massive galaxies and how supermassive black holes grow in mass and size and how they can affect their host galaxies.

I study the inner environment of supermassive black holes using a technique called the “Reverberation Mapping”.  This technique is the only method for directly measuring reliable black hole mass beyond the local universe, and can also measure the size and geometry of black hole accretion flows. Mass and accretion-disk structure are among the most fundamental parameters of black holes and understanding their evolution across cosmic time is critical to study the black hole – galaxy coevolution.

I use observations from Hubble, Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Canada France Hawaii, and Bok telescope to study optical and UV lightcurves which may be the key to unlocking the physics of accretion onto active black holes at the center of galaxies. You can find more information about my research in the Uconn Today article.

• Homayouni, Y., Trump, R. J., Grier, C. J., et al. 2020, The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: MgII Lag Results from Four years of Monitoring (Accepted for publication in ApJ)
• Homayouni, Y., Trump, R. J., Grier, C. J., et al. 2019, The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: Accretion disk sizes from continuum lags, ApJ, 880, 126, 2019
• Fonseca Alvarez, G., Trump, R. J, Homayouni, Y., et al. 2020, The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: The H-beta Radius-Luminosity relation (Accepted for publication in ApJ)
• Dalla Bonta, E., Peterson, B. M., Bentz, M., et al. 2020, The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: Estimating Masses of Black Holes in Quasars with Single-Epoch Spectroscopy, arXiv:2007.02963
• Wang, S., Shen, Y., Jiang, L. et al. 2020, The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: How Broad Emission Line Widths Change When Luminosity Changes, arXiv:2006.06178
• Li, J., Shen, Y., Ho, L. C. et al. 2020, The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: The Mbh-Host Relations at 0.2<z<0.6 from Reverberation Mapping and Hubble Space Telescope Imaging, arXiv:2006.02522
• Grier, C. J., Shen, Y., Horne, K. et al. 2019, The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: CIV Lag Results from Four years of Data, ApJ, 887, 38, 2019
• Dexter, J., Xin, S., Shen, Y. et al. 2019, The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: Accretion and Broad Emission Line Physics from a Hypervariable Quasar, ApJ, 885, 44, 2019
• Li, J., Shen, Y., Brandt, W. N. et al. 2019, The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: Comparison of Lag Measurement Methods with Simulated Observations, ApJ, 884, 119, 2019