Related papers: A Primer to Slow Light
Black holes are a common feature of the Universe. They are observed as stellar mass black holes spread throughout galaxies and as supermassive objects in their centres. Observations of stars orbiting close to the centre of our Galaxy…
I review elements of the foundations of black-hole theory with attention to problematic issues, and describe some techniques which either seem to help with the difficulties or at least investigate their scope. The definition of black holes…
Using numerical simulations we show how to realise an optical black hole laser, i.e. an amplifier formed by travelling refractive index perturbations arranged so as to trap light between a white and a black hole horizon. The simulations…
These lectures are intended to provide a brief pedagogical review of dark matter for the newcomer to the subject. We begin with a discussion of the astrophysical evidence for dark matter. The standard weakly-interacting massive particle…
Gravitational lensing is an invaluable probe of the nature of dark matter, and the structures it forms. Lensed gravitational waves in particular allow for unparalleled sensitivity to small scale structures within the lenses, due to the…
We examine the observational appearance of an optically thick, spherically symmetric, relativistic wind (a black hole wind). In a relativistic flow, the apparent optical depth becomes small in the downstream direction, while it is large in…
We provide a pedagogical introduction to non-particle dark matter, focused on primordial black holes (PBHs), black holes that may form in the early Universe from large overdensities. First, we outline the key properties of PBHs and how they…
Quantitative analysis of slow light experiments utilising coherent population oscillation (CPO) in a range of saturably absorbing media, including ruby and alexandrite, Er3+:Y2SiO5, bacteriorhodopsin, semi-conductor quantum devices and…
The purpose of these lecture notes is to describe the gravitational lens effects in different astrophysical contexts. These notes are voluntarily focused on the fundamental mechanisms and the basic concepts that are useful to describe these…
Strong gravitational lensing from black holes results in the formation of relativistic images, in particular, relativistic Einstein rings. For objects with event horizons, the radius of the unstable light ring (photon sphere) is the lowest…
In the past decades, different approaches have been developed in order to link the physical properties of galaxies to the dark matter haloes in which they reside. In this review, I give a brief overview of methods, aims, and limits of these…
Almost twenty years ago the light was slowed down to less than $10^{-7}$ of its vacuum speed in a cloud of ultracold atoms of sodium. Upon a sudden turn-off of the coupling laser, a slow light pulse can be imprinted on cold atoms such that…
We study the optical paths of the light rays propagating inside a nonlinear moving dielectric media. For the rapidly moving dielectrics we show the existence of a distinguished surface which resembles, as far as the light propagation is…
We consider the observational properties of a static black hole space-time immersed in a dark matter envelope. We thus investigate how the modifications to geometry, induced by the presence of dark matter affect the luminosity of the black…
Black holes are often characterized by event horizons, following the literature that laid the mathematical foundations of the subject in the 1970s. However black hole event horizons have two fundamental conceptual limitations. First, they…
An attempt is made in order to clarify the so called regular black holes issue. It is revisited that if one works within General Relativity minimally coupled with non linear source, mainly of electromagnetic origin, and within a static…
To account for the microlensing events observed in the Galactic halo, Gurevich, Zybin, and Sirota have proposed a model of gravitationally bound, noncompact objects with masses of 0.01-1M_\odot. These objects are formed in the expanding…
The radiation emitted by horizonless exotic compact objects (ECOs), such as wormholes, 2-2-holes, fuzzballs, gravastars, boson stars, collapsed polymers, superspinars etc., is expected to be strongly suppressed when compared to the…
Several physical and astrophysical problems related to accretion onto black holes and neutron stars are shortly reviewed. I discuss the observed differences between these two types of compact objects in quiescent Soft X-ray Transients. Then…
The present thesis deals with some properties of classical and quantum scalar fields in an inhomogeneous and/or time-dependent background, focusing on models where the latter can be described as a curved space-time with an event horizon.…