Mai Liao

Rubin-Chile Postdoctoral Fellow

I am currently an Rubin-Chile postdoctoral fellow at the IEA.

Projects

Time domain:

Specifically aims to search for highly variable mid-IR selected AGN, systematically identify AGN transients by using archival spectra, ongoing and upcoming spectroscopic surveys, and follow-up spectroscopic observations using observatories based in Chile, as well as available multi-band data and that upcoming from LSST.

ALMA high-resolution [C II] imaging for Hot dust-obscured galaxies (Hot DOGs):

Specifically investigates the cold AGN outflows traced by [C II] emission line, and dynamically measure central black hole masses for these extreme AGN (i.e., in the early Universe!).

Highlights

First systematical statistic analysis of optical and X-ray properties on young radio AGN with two large samples, which highly complement for literature studies that mostly focus on the radio emission in this special AGN population (2020MNRAS.491…92L, 2020MNRAS.497..482L).
With a large radio quiet quasars (~37,000) sample, and without biased against radio faint quasars, the correlation between radio emission at 3 GHz and [O III] outflows remains solid after controlling the effects of SMBH mass, quasar luminosity, Eddington ratio and redshift, which confirms that outflows resulted from wide angle sub-relativistic quasar wind could make an important contribution to radio emission in radio quiet quasars (2024MNRAS.528.3696L).
Report the first dynamical measurement of an SMBH mass at redshift > 2, based on ALMA high spatial resolution observations of the [C II] emission line that resolve the black hole sphere of influence in the most luminous obscured quasar WISE J224607.6–052634.9 (W2246–0526) at redshift 4.6 (2025arXiv250413409L).