Related papers: Thermal synchrotron radiation and its Comptonizati…
The inverse Compton process by which soft photons are up-scattered by hot electrons in a corona plays a fundamental role in shaping the X-ray spectra of black-hole (BH) low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs), particularly in the hard and…
In earlier works, it was shown that the energy dependent soft time lags observed in kHz QPOs of neutron star low mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) can be explained as being due to Comptonization lags provided a significant fraction ($\eta \sim…
We discuss in detail the broad band X-ray variability expected in Seyfert galaxies in the framework of a Compton cooled corona model. Variations in the optical depth tau of the corona cause spectral changes in the Comptonized emission in…
Coronal hard X-ray (HXR) and continuum gamma-ray sources associated with the impulsive phase of solar flares have been the subject of renewed interest in recent years. They have been interpreted in terms of thin-target, nonthermal…
Accretion in black hole X-ray binaries is commonly believed to be supplied by the Roche lobe overflow or the stellar wind. The former is thought to form a geometrically thin disc while the diffuse wind could form a geometrically thick hot…
Information on the spectral shape of prompt emission in gamma-ray bursts (GRB) is mostly available only at energies $\gtrsim10$ keV, where the main instruments for GRB detection are sensitive. The origin of this emission is still very…
We present a complete solution to the cyclotron-synchrotron radiation due to an isotropic distribution of electrons moving in a magnetic field. We make no approximations in the calculations other than artificially broadening the harmonics…
We find a very strong correlation between the intrinsic spectral slope in X-rays and the amount of Compton reflection from a cold medium in Seyfert AGNs and in hard state of X-ray binaries with either black holes or weakly-magnetized…
Electromagnetic radiation in the soft x-ray spectral range ($1-100~\rm{nm}$ wavelengths or $0.01-1~\rm{keV}$ photon energies) is rapidly gaining importance in both fundamental research and industrial applications. At present the degree of…
We discuss the possibility that a significant contribution of the hard X-ray Background is the integrated emission from a population of galaxies undergoing advection-dominated accretion in their nuclei. Owing to poor coupling between ions…
We discuss the expected X-ray spectral and variability properties of black hole accretion discs at high luminosity, under the hypothesis that radiation pressure dominated discs are subject to violent clumping instabilities and, as a result,…
We show that an upper limit of ~ 10^{12} K on the peak brightness temperature for an incoherent synchrotron radio source, commonly referred to in the literature as an inverse Compton limit, may not really be due to inverse Compton effects.…
The role of Compton cooling in the standard model for the afterglows of gamma-ray bursts is considered. When electrons cool by scattering off their own synchrotron photons, three cooling regimes are identified in which the observed…
Within the disk-corona model, it is natural to expect that a fraction of reflection photons from the disk are Compton scattered by the hot corona (reflection Comptonization), even if this effect is usually ignored in X-ray reflection…
Measured values of the brightness temperature of low-frequency synchrotron radiation emitted by powerful extragalactic sources reach 10^11--10^12 K. If some amount of nonrelativistic ionized gas is present within such sources, it should be…
High-resolution hydrodynamics simulations of the Ly-alpha forest in cold dark matter dominated cosmologies appear to predict line widths that are substantially narrower than those observed. Here we point out that Compton heating of the…
We investigate accretion disc models for the X-ray emission of Seyfert-1 galaxies and the hard state of black-hole X-ray binaries. We concentrate on two hot accretion disc models: advection-dominated accretion flow (ADAF) and recently found…
We present solutions for the structure of the boundary layer where the accretion disk meets the neutron star, which is expected to be the dominant source of high-energy radiation in low-mass X-ray binaries which contain weakly magnetized…
We report the results of a spectral analysis over the range 0.1-200 keV performed on the dipping source X 1822-371 observed by BeppoSAX. We find the best fit to the continuum using a partially covered Comptonization model, due to scattering…
We develop a Monte Carlo Comptonization model for the X-ray spectrum of accretion-powered pulsars. Simple, spherical, thermal Comptonization models give harder spectra for higher optical depth, while the observational data from Vela X-1…