I am interested in the physics in extraterrestrial extreme-environments. Pulsar is one of the excellent examples with such extremeness, which can be mainly classified into:

• Rotation-powered pulsars
• Radio pulsars
• Rotation-powered X-ray pulsars
• Gamma ray pulsars
• Accretion-powered pulsars
• Accretion-powered X-ray pulsars
• X-ray bursters
• Magnetism-powered (?) pulsars (Magnetars?)
• Soft gamma ray repeaters
• Anomalous X-ray pulsars

Let's listen to the Vela pulsar (the sound of Vela) in radio band ...

We currently believe, according to various observations, that pulsars are celestial bodies which are distinguished by their compactness (about 1.4 solar mass, but only about 10 km radius). What's the nature of pulsars? Two models are tried to answer this question:

• The neutron star model
• The quark star model

Neutron stars and quark stars are composed of neutron (hadron) matter and quark matter, respectively. One kind of quark stars, which is popularly discussed in literatures, is strange quark star (i.e., quark star with strangeness). Can we find hard observational evidence to rule out that pulsars are neutron stars or strange stars? This is certainly one of the key projects of astrophysics in the coming years.

A brief introduction to my major research could be found at:

Strange matter in the Universe: the many faces

Publications for scientific popularization and others (in Chinese, .pdf or .ps files)

Published in Periodic Journals

Conference Proceedings