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Relativistic plasmas are central to the study of black hole accretion, jet physics, neutron star mergers, and compact object magnetospheres. Despite the need to accurately capture the dynamics of these plasmas and the implications for…
Atomic polarization phenomena impinge upon a number of areas and processes in physics. The dielectric constant and refractive index of any gas are examples of macroscopic properties that are largely determined by the dipole polarizability.…
Plasmas with electromagnetic fields turbulent at sub-Larmor-scales are a feature of a wide variety of high-energy-density environments, and are essential to the description of many astrophysical/laboratory plasma phenomena. Radiation from…
3D particle-in-cell simulations demonstrate that the enhanced transparency of a relativistically hot plasma is sensitive to how the energy is partitioned between different degrees of freedom. For an anisotropic electron distribution,…
Accretion onto a compact object must occur through a disc when the material has some initial angular momentum. Thin discs and the thicker low radiative efficiency accretion flows are solutions to this problem that have been widely studied…
X-ray polarimetry is now providing a new way to look at the high energy sky. The addition of two observables, polarization fraction and angle, reveals crucial new information on the structure of accretion flows and magnetic fields in…
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,…
This review discusses the physics of magnetic reconnection, a process in which the magnetic field topology changes and magnetic energy is converted to kinetic energy, in pair plasmas in the relativistic regime. We focus on recent progress…
Left and right circularly polarized transverse electromagnetic waves propagate at slightly different speeds in a magnetic material leading to a polarization rotation by an amount proportional to the projection of the magnetic field along…
Radiatively-driven transfer flow perpendicular to a luminous disk is examined in the relativistic regime of $(v/c)^2$, taking into account the gravity of the central object. The flow is assumed to be vertical, and the gas pressure as well…
The experimental demonstration and characterization is made of the plasmon-mediated resonant transmission through an embedded undulated continuous thin metal film under normal incidence. 1D undulations are shown to enable a spatially…
Light transfer in gradient-index media generally follows curved ray trajectories, which will cause light beam to converge or diverge during transfer and induce the rotation of polarization ellipse even when the medium is transparent.…
Magnetic reconnection -- a fundamental plasma physics process, where magnetic field lines of opposite polarity annihilate -- is invoked in astrophysical plasmas as a powerful mechanism of nonthermal particle acceleration, able to explain…
We calculate the structure of a relativistic shock wave in which the internal energy of the shocked fluid is radiated away on a time scale much shorter than the characteristic shock propagation time. The shock is assumed to move through a…
Faraday rotation measure at radio wavelengths is commonly used to diagnose large-scale magnetic fields. It is argued that the length-scales on which magnetic fields vary in large-scale diffuse astrophysical media can be inferred from…
Accretion flows onto underluminous black holes, such as Sagittarius A* at the center of our galaxy, are dilute (mildly collisional to highly collisionless), optically thin, and radiatively inefficient. Therefore, the accretion properties of…
The properties of light rays around compact objects surrounded by a plasma are affected by both strong gravitational fields described by a general-relativistic spacetime and by a dispersive and refractive medium, characterized by the…
We use a probabilistic method to compute the propagation of an ionization front corresponding to the re-ionization of the intergalactic medium in a LCDM cosmology, including both hydrogen and helium. The effects of radiative transfer…
The most promising indirect search for the existence of axion dark matter uses radio telescopes to look for narrow spectral lines generated from the resonant conversion of axions in the magnetospheres of neutron stars. Unfortunately, a…
Polarized models of relativistically hot astrophysical plasmas require transport coefficients as input: synchrotron absorption and emission coefficients in each of the four Stokes parameters, as well as three Faraday rotation coefficients.…