Related papers: Lines of sight through randomly oriented flattened…
Many synoptic surveys are observing large parts of the sky multiple times. The resulting lightcurves provide a wonderful window to the dynamic nature of the universe. However, there are many significant challenges in analyzing these light…
This paper considers environmental problems of natural and anthropogenic atmospheric aerosol pollution and its global and regional monitoring. Efficient aerosol investigations may be achieved by spectropolarimetric measurements.…
We present results of surveys for high redshift galaxies selected by their having produced detectable Mg~II and Lyman limit absorption in the spectra of background QSOs. We discuss the properties of the absorbing galaxies, the connection…
High resolution rest frame UV quasar absorption spectra covering low and high ionization species, as well as the Lyman series lines, provide remarkably detailed information about the gaseous phases of galaxies and their environments. For…
We provide a theoretical foundation for the statistical approach for computing the absorption properties of particles in the Rayleigh domain. We present a general method based on the Discrete Dipole Approximation (DDA) to compute the…
Massive structures, such as galaxies, act as strong gravitational lenses on background sources. When the background source is a quasar, several lensed images are seen, as magnified or de-magnified versions of the same object. The detailed…
Linear combinations of Bessel beams can be used to effectively trap light within cylindrical domains. Such hard traps can be used to produce states that exhibit stationary arrays of optical vortices from the perspective of a steadily…
Gravitational lensing directly measures mass density fluctuations along the lines of sight to very distant objects. No assumptions need to be made concerning bias, the ratio of fluctuations in galaxy density to mass density. Hence, lensing…
With close pairs of quasars at different redshifts, a background quasar sightline can be used to study a foreground quasar's environment in absorption. We used a sample of 17 Lyman limit systems with column density N_HI > 10^19 cm^-2…
Upcoming large multiwavelength photometric surveys will provide a leap in our understanding of small body populations, among other fields of modern astrophysics. Serendipitous observations of small bodies in different orbital locations…
Quasars are notable for the luminous power they emit across decades in frequency from the far-infrared through hard X-rays; emission at different frequencies emerges from physical scales ranging from AUs to parsecs. Each wavelength regime…
We present a generalization of the notoriously unwieldy second-order scattering fading model, which is helpful to alleviate its mathematical complexity while providing an additional degree of freedom. This is accomplished by allowing its…
We develop a new approach for studying flux anomalies in quadruply-imaged fold lens systems. We show that in the absence of substructure, microlensing, or differential absorption, the expected flux ratios of a fold pair can be tightly…
The Fourier spectral techniques that are common in Astronomy for analyzing periodic or multi-periodic light-curves lose their usefulness when they are applied to unsteady light-curves. We review some of the novel techniques that have been…
X-ray and optical observations of quadruply lensed quasars can provide a microarcsecond probe of the lensed quasar, corresponding to scale sizes of \~10^2-10^4 gravitational radii of the central black hole. This high angular resolution is…
Based on fundamental properties of light scattering by a particle we reveal the existence of the ultimate upper limit for the light absorption by any partial mode. First, we obtain this result for scattering of a plane wave by a symmetric…
Quasars, as the most luminous persistent sources in the Universe, have broad applications for cosmological studies. In particular, they can be employed to directly measure the expansion history of the Universe, similarly to SNe Ia. The…
We introduce an absorption imaging technique for ultracold gases that suppresses interference fringes and coherence-induced artifacts by reducing the transverse spatial coherence of the imaging light. The method preserves the narrow…
Cascaded optical cavities appear in various quantum information processing schemes in which atomic qubits are sitting in separate cavities interconnected by photons as flying qubits. The usual theoretical description relies on a…
The flux-ratio anomalies observed in multiply-lensed quasar images are most plausibly explained as the result of perturbing structures superposed on the underlying smooth matter distribution of the primary lens. The cold dark matter…