Related papers: GYOTO 2.0: a polarized relativistic ray-tracing co…
We present recent developments on numerical algorithms for computing photon and particle trajectories in the surrounding of compact objects. Strong gravity around neutron stars or black holes causes relativistic effects on the motion of…
Accretion onto compact objects plays a central role in high energy astrophysics. In these environments, both general relativistic and plasma effects may have significant impacts upon the propagation of photons. We present a full general…
A key challenge in imaging supermassive black holes is disentangling gravitational effects from plasma physics in order to accurately determine spacetime properties, particularly black hole spin. In this Letter, we present a fully covariant…
We describe a Monte Carlo radiative transport code intended for calculating spectra of hot, optically thin plasmas in full general relativity. The version we describe here is designed to model hot accretion flows in the Kerr metric and…
Advancement in recent years in the field of experimental gravitation has allowed to test the equivalence principle in regimes that were previously unexplored, allowing for unprecedented verifications of general relativity and also enabling…
We present a numerical implementation of the guiding center approximation to describe the relativistic motion of charged test particles in the PLUTO code for astrophysical plasma dynamics. The guiding center approximation (GCA) removes the…
X-ray polarimetry is still largely uncharted territory. With the upcoming launch of IXPE, we will learn a lot more about X-ray polarization at energies above 2 keV, but so far no current or accepted mission provides observational…
Observational efforts to image the immediate environment of a black hole at the scale of the event horizon benefit from the development of efficient imaging codes that are capable of producing synthetic data, which may be compared with…
Models for the observational appearance of astrophysical black holes rely critically on accurate general-relativistic ray tracing and radiation transport to compute the intensity measured by a distant observer. In this paper, we illustrate…
We present an updated version of POLARIS, a well established code designated for dust polarisation and line radiative transfer (RT) in arbitrary astrophysical environments. We extend the already available capabilities with a synchrotron…
This dissertation elaborates on X-ray polarisation features of astrophysical environments near accreting black holes. Although the work was originally assigned to supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei, the results are also…
Recent developments in the spectropolarimetric study of compact objects, specifically black holes (stellar and massive) and neutron stars are reviewed. The lectures are organized around five topics: disks, jets, outflows, neutron stars and…
We present a portable polarimeter capable of real-time visualization of partial and fully polarized light over a broad band of wavelengths. Our system utilizes a Raspberry Pi computer with a low-cost data acquisition "HAT" (DAQ HAT) and an…
Recent imaging of supermassive black holes by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has relied on exhaustive parameter-space searches, matching observations to large, precomputed libraries of theoretical models. As observational data become…
The great success of the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) has shown that X-ray timing is an excellent tool for the study of strong gravitational fields and the measurement of fundamental physical properties of black holes and neutron…
Polarization observations using modern radio telescopes cover large numbers of frequency channels over broad bandwidths, and require advanced techniques to extract reliable scientific results. We present RM-Tools, analysis software for…
In this article we propose a numerical algorithm to compute the intensity and polarization of a polychromatic electromagnetic radiation crossing a medium with graded refractive index and modeled by the Vector Radiative Refractive Transfer…
Accurate radiative transfer coefficients (emissivities, absorptivities, and rotativities) are needed for modeling radiation from relativistically hot, magnetized plasmas such as those found in Event Horizon Telescope sources. Here we…
PyLlama is a handy Python toolkit to compute the electromagnetic reflection and transmission properties of arbitrary multilayered linear media, including the case of anisotropy. Relying on a $4 \times 4$-matrix formalism, PyLlama implements…
The great success of the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) has given us a new probe to study strong gravitational fields and to measure the physical properties of black holes and neutron stars. Here, we describe a "next-generation" x-ray…