Related papers: Relativistic light sails need to billow
Relativistic jets, or highly collimated and fast-moving outflows, are endemic to many astrophysical phenomena. The jets produced by gamma-ray bursts and tidal disruption events are accompanied by the accretion of material onto a black hole…
We conduct hydrodynamical numerical simulations and find that precessing massive slow jets can inflate fat bubbles, i.e., more or less spherical bubbles, that are attached to the center of clusters of galaxies. To inflate a fat bubble the…
The appeal of lasers can be attributed to both their ubiquitous applications and their role as model systems for elucidating nonequilibrium and cooperative phenomena. Introducing novel concepts in lasers thus has a potential for both…
When a relativistic laser pulse with high photon density interacts with a specially tailored thin foil target, a strong torque is exerted on the resulting spiral-shaped foil plasma, or light fan. Because of its structure, the latter can…
Relativistic equation of state and velocity comparable with the speed of light are included in consideration of a superfluid rotating in a cylindrical container. Minimizing the free energy, we derive the equation of motion. It admits an…
We present a new, approximate method for modelling the acceleration and collimation of relativistic jets in the presence of gravity. This method is self-similar throughout the computational domain where gravitational effects are negligible…
Controlling the longitudinal phase space of high-brightness relativistic electron beams is crucial for advancing a broad spectrum of charged-particle-based instrumentation and scientific frontiers. A generalized method for achieving this…
A synopsis of the recent results from our study of galaxy-galaxy lensing in clusters is presented. We have applied our analysis techniques to the sample of HST cluster-lenses that span a redshift range from redshift 0.18 to 0.58. We find…
We present raytracing computations for light emitted from the surface of a rapidly-rotating neutron star in order to construct light curves for X-ray pulsars and bursters. These calculations are for realistic models of rapidly-rotating…
A popular physics legend holds that scissors can cut paper with a speed faster than light. Here this counter-intuitive myth is investigated theoretically using four simple examples of scissors. For simplicity, all cases will involve a…
Various authors have investigated the problem of light deflection by radially moving gravitational lenses - with inconsistent results. In this paper we generalize the calculations for arbitrary lens velocities and show that, to first order…
When an optical beam propagates through a turbulent medium such as the atmosphere or ocean, the beam will become distorted. It is then natural to seek the best or optimal beam that is distorted least, under some metric such as intensity or…
High-energy-density flows through dense matter are needed for effective progress in the production of laser-driven intense sources of energetic particles and radiation, in driving matter to extreme temperatures creating state regimes…
The bending of lightrays by the gravitational field of a ``lens'' that is moving relative to the observer is calculated within the approximation of weak fields, small angles and thin lenses. Up to first order in $v/c$ -- and assuming the…
In this paper I show that the concept of relativistic beaming -- the process by which light emitted by a fast moving sources is lensed towards the direction of motion -- can be easily extended to model the signal from both the star and any…
The photon mean free path in a relativistically moving medium becomes long in the down-stream direction while short in the up-stream direction. As a result, the observed optical depth $\tau$ becomes small in the downstream direction while…
We consider radiation of relativistic electrons accelerated within the jet extended boundary layer. Due to velocity shear across the boundary the observed jet/counterjet brightness ratio is diminished as compared to the one derived for the…
In a random laser (RL), a system possessing in itself both resonator and amplifying medium while lacking of a macroscopic cavity, the feedback is provided by the scattering, which forces light to travel across very long random paths. Here…
We propose a new procedure for measuring the spin of a black hole with an unprecedented accuracy based on the gravitational lensing of millisecond pulsars. We derive the basic equations for lensing by a rotating black hole. We show that the…
We demonstrate lasing into counter-propagating modes of a ring cavity using a gas of cold atoms as a gain medium. The laser operates under the usual conditions of magneto-optical trapping with no additional fields. We characterize the…