Related papers: GYOTO 2.0: a polarized relativistic ray-tracing co…
The THERMOS toolkit has been developed to calculate radiative properties of plasmas. This article contains a brief survey of some of its key features used by calculation of opacities and emissivities and by analysis of specific experiments.…
Black hole environments often host plasmas that are fully collisionless or contain intrinsically collisionless regions, including relativistic jets and coronae where particle energization is ubiquitous. Capturing the physics of these…
Ray tracing codes are useful to study the electromagnetic wave propagation and absorption in the geometrical optics approximation. In magnetized fusion plasma community, most ray tracing codes assume the plasma density and temperature be…
This Thesis describes the basic framework and applications of a relativistic ray-tracing code for analyzing accretion processes around Kerr black holes. We begin in Chapter 1 with a brief historical summary of the major advances in black…
This white paper highlights compact object and fundamental physics science opportunities afforded by high-throughput broadband (0.1-60 keV) X-ray polarization observations. X-ray polarimetry gives new observables with geometric information…
Polarimetry is about to become a powerful tool for determining the atmospheric properties of exoplanets. To provide the basis for the interpretation of observational results and for predictive studies to guide future observations,…
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has recently released high-resolution images of accretion flows onto two supermassive black holes. Our physical understanding of these images depends on accuracy and precision of numerical models of plasma…
Motivated by possible observations of the black hole candidate in the center of our galaxy and the galaxy M87, ray-tracing methods are applied to both standard General Relativity (GR) and a recently proposed extension, the pseudo-complex…
In this paper, we focus on testing gravity theories in the radiative regime using pulsar timing array observations. After reviewing current techniques to measure the dispersion and alternative polarization of gravitational waves, we extend…
Polarization measurements in the X-ray and gamma-ray energy range can provide crucial information on massive compact objects such as black holes and neutron stars. The Polarized Gamma-ray Observer (PoGO) is a new balloon-borne instrument…
Context. Magnetic fields are important to the dynamics of many astrophysical processes and can typically be studied through polarization observations. Polarimetric interferometry capabilities of modern (sub)millimeter telescope facilities…
We present new calculations of X-ray polarization from black hole accretion disks in the thermally-dominated state, using a Monte-Carlo ray-tracing code in full general relativity. In contrast to many previously published studies, our…
General relativity is one of the pillars of modern physics. For decades, the theory has been mainly tested in the weak field regime with experiments in the Solar System and radio observations of binary pulsars. Until 2015, the strong field…
Polarized radiation serves as a vital diagnostic tool in astrophysics, providing unique insights into magnetic field geometries, scattering processes, and three-dimensional structures in diverse astrophysical scenarios. To address these…
Polarization information of the light can provide rich cues for computer vision and scene understanding tasks, such as the type of material, pose, and shape of the objects. With the advent of new and cheap polarimetric sensors, this imaging…
It has now become possible to study directly, via numerical simulation, the evolution of relativistic, radiation-dominated flows around compact objects. With this in mind we set out explicitly covariant forms of the radiative transfer…
Lyman-$\alpha$ (Ly$\alpha$) is a powerful astrophysical probe. Not only is it ubiquitous at high redshifts, it is also a resonant line, making Ly$\alpha$ photons scatter. This scattering process depends on the physical conditions of the gas…
We present a new code for radiation transport around Kerr black holes, including arbitrary emission and absorption terms, as well as electron scattering and polarization. The code is particularly useful for analyzing accretion flows made up…
Interpretation of resolved polarized images of black holes by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) requires predictions of the polarized emission observable by an Earth-based instrument for a particular model of the black hole accretion…
We present a generally applicable formalism for modeling the emission, absorption, reflection, and reprocessing of radiation by moving plasma streams close to a Kerr Black hole. The formalism can be used to investigate the observational…