Abstract：Tidal disruption events (TDEs) provide unique laboratories to study the demographics, immediate stellar and gaseous environments, and accretion physics of the massive black hole population. Over the past few years, time domain sky surveys such as the optical Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) have led to a surge of TDE discoveries in galaxy centers. In this talk, I will first present how detailed X-ray studies of some ZTF-discovered TDEs have revealed the evolving inflow and outflow properties during the black hole super-Eddington accretion phase. Next, I will summarize our efforts to understand black hole demographics with TDEs, including inferring the shape of the local black hole mass function down to ~1e+5 Msun and searching for the population of off-nuclear wandering black holes. In the end, I will describe new opportunities in the studies of TDEs and related nuclear transients offered by upcoming time domain experiments.
Bio：Yuhan Yao is a Miller postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. With a broad interest in time domain astronomy and high energy astrophysics, she uses wide-field sky surveys and targeted multi-wavelength observations to study the physics of energetic transients, such as the disruption of stars by massive black holes and the explosions of stars. Yuhan obtained her Ph.D. in June 2023 from Caltech, and received her B.S. in Astronomy from Peking University in 2018.