Related papers: A Primer to Slow Light
Slow light in moving media reaches a paradoxical regime when the flow speed of the medium approaches the group velocity of light. Pulses can penetrate a region where a counter-propagating flow exceeds the group velocity. When the…
New varying speed of light (VSL) theories as alternatives to the inflationary model of the universe are discussed and evidence for a varying speed of light reviewed. Work linked with VSL but primarily concerned with deriving Planck's black…
After a long wait, gravitational wave astronomy has finally begun. Binary black hole mergers are being detected by LIGO and Virgo, and theorists are starting to receive a wealth of data to be analized. At this point we can at long last…
S. Chandrasekhar wrote in the prologue to his book on black holes, "The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time."…
Cosmology is living through fascinating times, where new observations from ground and space telescopes are questioning the established paradigm, the so-called Lambda Cold Dark Matter model. The particle nature of Dark Matter is severely…
The compact dark objects with very large masses residing at the centres of galaxies are believed to be black holes. Due to the gravitational lensing effect, they would cast a shadow larger than their horizon size over the background, whose…
In this paper we report on the observation of novel and highly unusual magnetic state of light. It appears that in small holes light quanta behave as small magnets so that light propagation through such holes may be affected by magnetic…
In the present work, we theoretically investigate gravitational lensing in the spacetime of a holonomy corrected Schwarzschild black hole. Analytical expressions for the light deflection angle are obtained in both the weak field limit and…
Propagation of light in nonlinear materials is here studied in the regime of the geometrical optics. It is shown that a spherically symmetric medium at rest with some specific dielectric properties can be used to produce an exact analogue…
Recent developments in the spectropolarimetric study of compact objects, specifically black holes (stellar and massive) and neutron stars are reviewed. The lectures are organized around five topics: disks, jets, outflows, neutron stars and…
Stupendously large astrophysical black holes (SLABs) are hypothetical black holes with masses of more than a trillion Suns. Because observable consequences of their existence have only recently been seriously considered, there have been…
Within Einstein's theory of gravity, any compact object heavier than a few solar masses must be a black hole. Any observation showing otherwise would imply either new physics beyond General Relativity or new exotic matter fields beyond the…
Condensed matter analogs of the cosmological environment have raised the hope that laboratory experiments can be done to test theoretical ideas in cosmology. I will describe Unruh's sonic analog of a black hole (``dumbhole'') that can be…
Galactic dark matter is modelled by a scalar field in order to effectively modify Kepler's law without changing standard Newtonian gravity. In particular, a solvable toy model with a self-interaction U(Phi) borrowed from non-topological…
The dark matter halo has non-negligible effects on the gravitational lensing of supermassive black hole in the galaxy center. Our work presents a study on the time-delay of light in gravitational lensing of black holes enclosed by dark…
The idea that dark matter could be made of stable relics of microscopic black holes is not new. In this article, we revisit this hypothesis, focusing on the creation of black holes by the scattering of trans-Planckian particles in the early…
The origin of light is a unsolved mystery in nature. Recently, it was suggested that light may originate from a new kind of order - quantum order. To test this idea in experiments, we study systems of screened magnetic/electric dipoles in…
We introduce simplified models for enhancements in the matter power spectrum at small scales and study their implications for dark matter substructure and gravitational observables. These models capture the salient aspects of a variety of…
Compact objects with a light sphere such as black holes and wormholes can reflect light rays like a mirror. This gravitational lensing phenomenon is called retrolensing and it is an interesting tool to survey dark and compact objects with a…
The nature of dark matter is still an open problem. The simplest assumption is that gravity is the only force coupled certainly to dark matter and thus the micro black holes could be a viable candidate. We investigated the possibility of…