Research

My research revolves around studing the intergalactic medium and and how its evolution can inform us about the history of galaxies. I use a variety of techniques to probe different regions and phases of the intergalactic medium including state-of-the-art cosmological simulations, fast radio bursts and galaxy-absorber pairs in quasar spectra.

I am ‘usually’ a theorist, typically working with large cosmological simulations. However I do occassionally dabble with observations.

My list of publications are avaliable on ADS, via my ORCID page and google scholar.

A list of my recent scientific talks can be found on my talks page.

Research Interests

The Intergalactic Medium

The majority of the cosmological matter in the Universe has never fallen into a galaxy halo. Instead, observations and models indicate that approximately 80% of baryons reside in the low-density environment known as the intergalactic medium (IGM).

During the era of the first stars and galaxy formation, the IGM provided the initial conditions from which galaxies grew. The IGM also is the reservoir of prestine gas which galaxies accrete to form new stars. The IGM is critical for our understanding of galaxy evolution and the bulk evolution of matter in the Universe, however the low densities and high temperatures makes observations in the UV and optical extremely difficult.

Publications

Batten, A. J., et al., “Fast radio bursts as probes of feedback from active galactic nuclei”, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, vol. 512, iss. 1, May 2022, Pages L49-L53, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnrasl/slac020

Batten, A. J., et al., “The cosmic dispersion measure in the EAGLE simulations”, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol. 505, iss. 4, August 2021, Pages 5356–5369, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stab1528

Batten, A. J., “Fruitbat: A Python Package for Estimating Redshifts of Fast Radio Bursts”, The Journal of Open Source Software, vol. 4, no. 37, 2019. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01399.

Software

FRUITBAT

FRUITBAT is an open source fast radio burst (FRB) redshift estimation package written in Python. Repo on Github