Related papers: Variability in Blazars
We show that there is no universal law describing how the spectra and luminosity of synchrotron and inverse Compton radiation from relativistic jets change with increasing observation angle. Instead, the physics of particle acceleration…
Variability can be the pathway to understanding the physical processes in astrophysical jets, however, the high-cadence observations required to test particle acceleration models are still missing. Here we report on the first attempt to…
High-energy photons propagating in the magnetised medium with large velocity gradients can mediate energy and momentum exchange. Conversion of these photons into electron-positron pairs in the field of soft photons with the consequent…
A polarizable body moving in an external electromagnetic field will slow down. This effect is referred to as radiation damping and is analogous to Doppler cooling in atomic physics. Using the principles of special relativity we derive an…
We model the acceleration of electrons at a shock front in a relativistic blazar jet and compute the radiation they emit in a post-shock region which contains a homogeneous magnetic field. The full space, time and momentum dependence of the…
We investigate the motion of the primary beam outside the light cylinder in the pulsar wind. Inside the light cylinder both primary and secondary plasma move along dipole magnetic field lines where their energies can be arbitrary. But at…
Scattering phenomena between charged particles and highly excited Rydberg atoms are of critical importance in many processes in plasma physics and astrophysics. While a Maxwell-Boltzmann (MB) energy distribution for the charged particles is…
Supermassive black holes at the centre of active galactic nuclei power some of the most luminous objects in the Universe. Typically, very long baseline interferometric (VLBI) observations of blazars have revealed only funnel-like…
The effect of electrostatic microturbulence on fast particles rapidly decreases at high energy, but can be significant at moderate energy. Previous studies found that, in addition to changes in the energetic particle density, this results…
The interaction of TeV blazars emitted gamma-rays with the extragalactic background photons gives rise to a relativistic beam of electron-positron ($e^- e^+$) pairs propagating through the intergalactic medium, producing a cascade through…
Non-thermal electron populations are observed throughout the heliosphere. The relaxation of an electron beam is known to produce Langmuir waves which, in turn, may substantially modify the electron distribution function. As the Langmuir…
The polarization signatures of the blazar emissions are known to be highly variable. In addition to small fluctuations of the polarization angle around a mean value, sometimes large (> 180^o) polarization angle swings are observed. We…
A general theory of optical forces on moving bodies is here developed in terms of generalized/4x4 transfer and scattering matrices. Results are presented for a planar dielectric multilayer of arbitrary refractive index placed in an…
A plausible model for the Crab Nebula is one in which a particle dominated, highly relativistic wind from the pulsar passes through a shock front in which the particles attain a power law energy distribution. The electrons and positrons…
Many powerful and variable gamma-ray sources, including pulsar wind nebulae, active galactic nuclei and gamma-ray bursts, seem capable of accelerating particles to gamma-ray emitting energies efficiently over very short time scales. These…
Gravitational and hydrodynamical perturbations are analysed in a relativistic plasma containing a mixture of interacting fluids characterized by a non-negligible bulk viscosity coefficient. The energy-momentum transfer between the…
We analyze a grid of radiative hydrodynamic simulations of solar flares to study the energy balance and response of the atmosphere to nonthermal electron beam heating. The appearance of chromospheric bubbles is one of the most notable…
The recent discovery, by the Chandra satellite, that jets of blazars are strong X-ray emitters at large scales (0.1-1 Mpc) bears support to the hypothesis that (also) on these scales the emitting plasma is moving at highly relativistic…
Blazars are a subclass of active galactic nuclei with relativistic jets pointing toward the observer. They are notable for their flux variability at all observed wavelengths and timescales. Together with simultaneous measurements at lower…
We investigate the origin of high-energy emission in blazars within the context of the leptohadronic one-zone model. We find that $\gamma$-ray emission can be attributed to synchrotron radiation either from protons or from secondary leptons…