Related papers: Black Hole Ringdown Seen in Photon Polarization Sw…
Astrophysical black holes are usually surrounded by an accretion disk. At least parts of these accretion disks consist of a plasma in which light rays with different energies are dispersed. However, we usually do not know the exact…
Explicitly covariant analytical expressions are derived that describe the boundaries of shadows cast by massive particles scattered by a gravitating object. This covers scenarios with particles having effectively variable mass, such as…
Photons propagating in curved spacetime may, depending on their direction and polarisation, have velocities exceeding the ``speed of light'' c. This phenomenon arises through vacuum polarisation in QED and is a tidal gravitational effect…
Very-long baseline interferometric observations have resolved structure on scales of only a few Schwarzschild radii around the supermassive black holes at the centers of our Galaxy and M87. In the near future, such observations are expected…
The transport of photons in steady, spherical, scattering flows is investigated. The moment equations are solved analytically for accretion onto a Schwarzschild black hole, taking into full account relativistic effects. We show that the…
A classical circularly polarized electromagnetic wave carries angular momentum, and represents the classical limit of a photon, which carries quantized spin. It is shown that a very similar picture of a circularly polarized coherent wave…
We have investigated the motion for photons in the Kerr black hole spacetime under the axion-photon coupling. The birefringence phenomena arising from the axion-photon coupling can be negligible in the weak coupling approximation because…
In this work, we investigate the critical behavior of photon rings in the Kerr-Bertotti-Robinson spacetime, describing a rotating black hole immersed in a background magnetic field. We analyze the radial and angular motions of photons under…
A strong light pulse propagating in a nonlinear Kerr medium produces a change in the refractive index, which makes light travel at different speeds inside and outside the pulse. By tuning the pulse velocity, an analog black hole horizon can…
We construct a new static, spherically symmetric black hole spacetime embedded in a dark matter halo whose density follows the cored Burkert profile. Starting from the halo-only geometry determined by the rotation curve relation, we solve…
Gravitational tidal forces acting on the virtual e+ e- cloud surrounding a photon endow spacetime with a non-trivial refractive index. This has remarkable properties unique to gravitational theories including superluminal low-frequency…
The ongoing observations of merging black holes by the instruments of the fledging gravitational wave astronomy has opened the way for testing the general relativistic Kerr black hole metric and, at the same time, for probing the existence…
Gravitational waves exhibit the unique signature of their spin-2 nature in processes of wave scattering, due to the interaction between spin and a background spacetime. Since the spin effect is more pronounced for longer wavelengths and…
Accretion disks around stellar-mass black holes (BHs) emit radiation peaking in the soft X-rays when the source is in the thermal state. The emerging photons are polarized and, for symmetry reasons, the polarization integrated over the…
The one-loop effective action for QED in curved spacetime contains equivalence principle violating interactions between the electromagnetic field and the spacetime curvature. These interactions lead to the dependence of photon velocity on…
The ringdown phase of a binary black-hole merger encodes key information about the remnant properties and provides a direct probe of the strong-field regime of General Relativity. While quasi-normal mode frequencies and damping times are…
The rotations of the polarization angle (PA) with time (energy) can lead to the depolarization of the time-integrated (energy-integrated) polarization. However, we don't know how and when it will rotate. Here, we consider the magnetic…
Recently the possibility of detecting echoes of ringdown gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers was shown. The presence of echoes is expected if the black hole is surrounded by a mirror that reflects gravitational waves near the…
The "ringdown" radiation emitted by oscillating black holes has great scientific potential. By carefully predicting the frequencies and amplitudes of black hole quasinormal modes and comparing them with gravitational-wave data from compact…
Gravitational radiation from a slightly distorted black hole with ringdown waveform is well understood in general relativity. It provides a probe for direct observation of black holes and determination of their physical parameters, masses…