Resources

Thesis work

During my education I had to write three theses, one for my undergrad, one for my masters, and the last one for my PhD. You can download those down here, earlier ones are a curious retrospective on how I wrote at a much junior stage.

• PhD thesis:
  "The impact of tides and mass transfer on the evolution of metal-poor massive binary stars"
  ADS entry here

• Master thesis:
  "Evolution of axially symmetric magnetic fields in neutron star crusts due to the Hall drift",
  results were published as Marchant et al. (2015)

• Undergrad thesis:
  "Large-scale instabilities of poloidal magnetic fields in stars"
  results were published as Marchant et al. (2011)

Teaching Material

GW astrophysics

These are the slides for a series of lectures I made on 2021 at KU Leuven as part of the course "high energy astrophysics". These are not meant to go deep into GR, but rather get an overview of what is measured by current detectors.

• Part 1: Overview

• Part 2: Ground based interferometers

• Part 3: GWs from compact binaries

• Part 4: Parameter estimation

• Part 5: Astrophysics of observed GW sources

Ordinary differential equations

After repeatedly being a teaching assistant for the course on ordinary differential equations at my university in Chile, I wrote down a set of notes including a summary of the covered material together with sets of problems with solutions. I know these these were still in use after I left, so in case someone else might find them useful they can be downloaded here. Just one warning, these are in spanish!

Illustrations

I often like to invest time making nice looking figures to illustrate my work. Although I am a bit critical of how they look, people seem to like them :). So here are a few. Some of these have come up on papers, some other on proposals. SVG files are provided here, so feel free to take specific parts to make something different. If you want to see some actually nice figures, scroll to the bottom.

• Different types of Roche lobe overflow. Figure from my PhD thesis.

• Evolution of a massive overcontact binary system leading to a binary black hole. Part of Marchant et al. (2017).

• Evolution of a close massive binary leading to a ULX. Part of Marchant et al. (2017).

• Formation of a Be X-ray binary. Made for an observing proposal.

• Illustration of various evolutionary channels leading to a merging binary black hole. Figure from a proposal.

• Formation of a binary black hole from common envelope and chemically homogeneous evolution, with potential pulsational pair-instability supernovae in between.
  Part of Marchant et al. 2019.

• Various uncertainties in the formation of a binary black hole from a binary star. Figure from a proposal.

• Formation of a binary containing an extremely low mass white dwarf. Made by request from Alina Istrate.

Nicer Illustrations

Also my wife (Sara Pinilla) has helped produce what I consider to be much prettier illustrations. You can find some of these below, if you like them and would like to use them, just be sure to credit her. Interpretation of what each image represents is up to the viewer!