Related papers: Relativistic light sails need to billow
Laser plasma accelerators have the potential to reduce the size of future linacs for high energy physics by more than an order of magnitude, due to their high gradient. Research is in progress at current facilities, including the BELLA…
We examine limits to the efficiency for particles acceleration in shearing flows, showing that relativistic flow speeds are required for efficient gradual shear acceleration. We estimate maximum achievable particle energies for parameters…
Relativistic stellar jets, produced in binary systems called microquasars, propagate through media with different spatial scales releasing their energy in the form of work and radiation from radio to gamma rays. There are several…
A classical and a relativistic law of motion for an advancing shell are deduced applying the thin layer approximation. A new parameter connected with the quantity of absorbed matter in the expansion is introduced; this allows of matching…
Kipping (2017) discusses relativistic reflection from light sails. As an extension to this work, we present a new formula for relativistic reflection of sunlight from a light sail moving at a velocity inclined at an arbitrary angle, using…
Laser-plasma technology promises a drastic reduction of the size of high energy electron accelerators. It could make free electron lasers available to a broad scientific community, and push further the limits of electron accelerators for…
We investigate obstacles of superluminal "warp drive" travels from interactions with interstellar matter and from curvature effects. The effect of collision of interstellar dust particles and photons with the spacecraft will all lead to a…
We use moment formalism of relativistic radiation hydrodynamics to obtain equations of motion of radial jets and solve them using polytropic equation of state of the relativistic gas. We consider curved space-time around black holes and…
X-ray observations of several kiloparsec-scale extragalactic jets favour a synchrotron origin. The short cooling times of the emitting electrons requires distributed acceleration of electrons up to sub-PeV energies. In a previous paper, we…
We performed MHD simulations of very light bipolar jets with density contrasts down to 10^-4 in axisymmetry, which were injected into a medium of constant density and evolved up to 200 kpc (200 r_j) full length. These jets show weak and…
The Solar sail is a large thin film used to collect solar light pressure for moving of space apparatus. Unfortunately, the solar radiation pressure is very small about 9 mkN/sq.m at Earth's orbit. However, the light force significantly…
Relativistic flying mirrors in plasmas are realized as thin dense electron (or electron-ion) layers accelerated by high-intensity electromagnetic waves to velocities close to the speed of light in vacuum. The reflection of an…
The primary challenge of rocket propulsion is the burden of needing to accelerate the spacecraft's own fuel, resulting in only a logarithmic gain in maximum speed as propellant is added to the spacecraft. Light sails offer an attractive…
Electron acceleration by relativistically intense laser beam propagating along a curved surface allows to split softly the accelerated electron bunch and the laser beam. The presence of a curved surface allows to switch an adiabatic…
Line-of-sight effects in strong gravitational lensing have long been treated as a nuisance. However, it was recently proposed that the line-of-sight shear could be a cosmological observable in its own right, if it is not degenerate with…
Electric sails are propulsion systems that generate momentum via the deflection of stellar wind particles through electric forces. Here, we investigate the relative merits of electric sails and light sails driven by stellar radiation…
Within the framework of general relativity, we investigate the tidal acceleration of astrophysical jets relative to the central collapsed configuration ("Kerr source"). We neglect electromagnetic forces throughout. The rest frame of the…
This paper presents a study for the realization of a space mission which employs nanosatellites driven by an external laser source impinging on an optimized lightsail, as a valuable technology to launch swarms of spacecrafts into the Solar…
Special relativity includes a concealed mechanism for reducing time-dilation effects in two mutually-receding objects. Forwarding their signals via one or more intermediate physical relay stages (a "probe chain") allows enhanced…
A substantial increase in local laser intensity is observed in the near field behind a plasma shutter.This increase is caused by the interference of the diffracted light at the relativistic plasma aperture and it is studied both…