Related papers: Shock Dissipation in Magnetically Dominated Impuls…
We analyze the dynamics of the shell produced when a bow shock from a collimated jet propagates into the surrounding medium. Under interstellar conditions, the shock is radiative, and a ballistic approximation for the shell flow is…
We review the recent observational results of the gamma-ray linear polarization of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs), and discuss some theoretical implications for the prompt emission mechanism and the magnetic composition of GRB jets. We also report…
The formation and large-scale propagation of Poynting-dominated jets produced by accreting, rapidly rotating black hole systems are studied by numerically integrating the general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic equations of motion to…
Short gamma-ray bursts originate when relativistic jets emerge from the remnants of binary neutron star mergers. Both the jet and the remnant are believed to be strongly magnetized, and the presence of magnetic fields is known to influence…
Evidence suggests that the gamma-ray burst (GRB) ejecta is likely magnetized, although the degree of magnetization of the ejecta is unknown. We derive a rigorous analytical solution for the relativistic 90 degree shocks under the ideal MHD…
Observational evidence for anisotropy in supernovae (SN) may signal the importance of angular momentum and differential rotation in the progenitors. Free energy in differential rotation and rotation can be extracted magnetically or via…
Based on a new approach on modeling the magnetically dominated outflows from AGNs (Li et al. 2006), we study the propagation of magnetic tower jets in gravitationally stratified atmospheres (such as a galaxy cluster environment) in large…
Besides light curves and spectra, polarization provides a different powerful tool of studying the $\gamma-$ray burst (GRB) prompt phase. Compared with the time-integrated and energy-integrated polarization, time-resolved and energy-resolved…
Although the physical origin of prompt emission in gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) remains inconclusive, previous studies have considered the synchrotron radiation of relativistic electrons as a promising mechanism. These works usually adopted a…
Both observational and theoretical studies indicate that the central engine of a gamma-ray burst (GRB) is intrinsically time-variable, implying jet inhomogeneity. A jet with an inhomogeneous Lorentz factor distribution develops internal…
The dissipation of turbulent magnetic fields is an appealing scenario to explain the origin of non-thermal particles in high-energy astrophysical sources. However, it has been suggested that the particle distribution may effectively…
When emission in a conical relativistic jet ceases abruptly (or decays sharply), the observed decay light curve is controlled by the high-latitude "curvature effect". Recently, Uhm & Zhang found that the decay slopes of three GRB X-ray…
It is proposed that the prompt emission observed in bursts that exhibit a thermal component originates from relativistic radiation mediated shocks that form below the photosphere of the GRB outflow. It is argue that such shocks are expected…
We present our recent results from numerical simulations of a magnetized flow in the vicinity of a black hole in the context of the collapsar model for GRBs. The simulations show that after an initial transient, the flow settles into a…
Evidence that the magnetic fields of extragalactic jets have a significant fraction of their energy in a random component is briefly summarized, and a detailed model of evolving, jet polarization structures is constructed, based on this…
The prompt GRB emission is thought to arise from electrons accelerated in internal shocks propagating within a highly relativistic outflow. The launch of Fermi offers the prospect of observations with unprecedented sensitivity in…
The central engine and jet composition of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) remain mysterious. Here we suggest that observations on polarization evolution of early optical afterglows may shed light on these questions. We first study the dynamics of a…
In the Poynting Flux dominated outflow (the initial ratio of the electromagnetic energy flux to the particle energy flux $\sigma_0\gg1$) model for Gamma-ray bursts, nearly half of the internally dissipated magnetic energy is converted into…
Particle acceleration in relativistic jets to very high energies occurs at the expense of the dissipation of magnetic or kinetic energy. Therefore, understanding the processes that can trigger this dissipation is key to the characterization…
We consider a jet-disk symbiosis model to explain Gamma Ray Bursts and their afterglows. It is proposed that GRBs develop in a pre-existing jet. We consider a binary system formed by a neutron star and an O/B/WR companion in which the…