Related papers: Accelerating strangelets via Penrose process in no…
The ability of a plasma surrounding spinning black holes to extract rotational energy and power energetic emissions has been recognized as a key astrophysical phenomenon. Important insights into the nature of this process are obtained…
In the framework of a model based on the gravitational field of the Kerr black hole, we turn to investigate the kinematic behavior of extragalactic jets. We analytically calculate the observable velocities and accelerations along any…
Black holes drive powerful plasma jets to relativistic velocities. This plasma should be collisionless, and self-consistently supplied by pair creation near the horizon. We present general-relativistic collisionless plasma simulations of…
The conjecture of Bodmer-Witten-Terazawa suggesting a form of quark matter (Strange Quark Matter) as the ground state of hadronic interactions has been studied in laboratory and astrophysical contexts by a large number of authors. If…
It has been shown that extremal Kerr black holes can be used as particle accelerators and arbitrarily high energy may be obtained near the event horizon. We study particle collisions near the event horizon (outer horizon) and Cauchy horizon…
We extend and refine a general method to extract the multipole moments of arbitrary stationary spacetimes and apply it to the study of a large family of regular horizonless solutions to $ {\cal N}{\,=\,}2$ four-dimensional supergravity…
Black holes are chaotic quantum systems that are expected to exhibit random matrix statistics in their finite energy spectrum. Lin, Maldacena, Rozenberg and Shan (LMRS) have proposed a related characterization of chaos for the ground states…
We discuss the possible appearance of strange exotic multi-quark states in the interior of neutron stars and signals for the existence of strange quark matter in the core of compact stars. We show how the in-medium properties of possible…
We study rocket-driven Penrose extraction in the test-particle limit on a fixed Kerr background for equatorial prograde flybys under explicit steering prescriptions. A spacecraft ejects exhaust inside the ergosphere; when the exhaust…
While theoretically established for decades, the Penrose process - energy extraction from rotating black holes - still lacks clear observational evidence. A promising theoretical framework posits magnetic reconnection in the ergosphere as a…
We construct the first family of microstate geometries of near-extremal black holes, by placing metastable supertubes inside certain scaling supersymmetric smooth microstate geometries. These fuzzballs differ from the classical black hole…
We review basic constraints on the acceleration of ultra-high-energy (UHE) cosmic rays (CRs) in astrophysical sources, namely the geometrical (Hillas) criterion and restrictions from radiation losses in different acceleration regimes. Using…
If a supermassive black hole has some material orbiting around it at close to its innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO), then, when it plunges into a second supermassive black hole, the orbiting material has a velocity dispersion of order…
We investigate the extraction of rotational energy from rotating Einstein-Born-Infeld (EBI) black holes, where nonlinear electrodynamics introduces a radius-dependent effective charge modifying the spacetime geometry. Focusing on neutral…
Cosmic rays accelerated to ultra-high energies (E>4x10^19 eV) in electric fields in accretion discs around supermassive black holes are discussed. Particle injection spectra are assumed to be harder than those formed in acceleration on…
I solve the equations of the low-energy limit of string theory to obtain a solution corresponding to a microcanonical ensemble of highly-excited superstrings. This ``Superball of Strings'' is a static, spherically symmetric ``fuzzball'' of…
The acceleration of ultra high energy cosmic rays is conjectured to occur through various interactions with the electromagnetic fields in different astrophysical objects, like magnetic matter clumps, besides the well-known shock and…
Astronomical observations and numerical simulations are providing increasing evidence that resistive effects in plasmas around black holes play an important role in determining the phenomenology observed from these objects. In this spirit,…
In this paper, we study rotating horizon less black shells as an alternative to Kerr black holes. We make use of Ernst's potential to solve the Einstein equations perturbatively in the angular momentum $a$. Calculating to order $a^6$, we…
In the espresso scenario, ultra-high-energy (UHE) cosmic rays (CRs) are produced via a one-shot reacceleration of galactic-like CRs in the relativistic jets of active galactic nuclei, independently of the scattering rate dictated by…