Henry Best

My name is Henry Best and I'm a postdoc researcher at Masaryk University working with Michal Zajacek. I work on joining together variability models for strongly lensed AGN in order to understand the biases in measurements. A notable example of this is the microlensing time delay associated with reverberation mapping. Due to differential magnification of a reverberating object, our preceived time lag between bands may differ from what is expected from simple models.

In order to study this effect, I have produced millions of simulated responses to a reverberating accretion disk for thousands of strong lensing configurations. Depending on the this lens configuration, some systems are inherently more biased towards longer than expected time lags. This can effect interband time lags as well, which is the true observable when studying distant sources.

I also collaborate with the LSST strong lensing and AGN subgroups in order to provide modular AGN models writen in Python. This makes the models themself transparent and easily integratable into other software. These are implimented in slsim, the LSST strong lensing simulation pipeline.