Related papers: The vacuum polarization around an axionic stringy …
We revisit the dynamics of a black hole accreting energy from a surrounding homogeneous and infinite space. We argue for a simple heuristic modification of the Schwarzschild approximation when the density of the medium is not negligible…
Black holes attract gaseous material from the surrounding environment. Cosmic plasma is largely ionized and magnetized because of electric currents flowing in the highly conductive environment near black holes; the process of accretion then…
We obtain the electrostatic energy of two opposite charges near the horizon of stationary black-holes in the massive Schwinger model. Besides the confining aspects of the model, we discuss the Bekenstein entropy upper bound of a charged…
Using low redshift data on astrophysical reionization, we report new Lyman-$\alpha$ limit on axion-like particle (ALP) as cold dark matter in ALP mass range of $m_{a}\sim 30-1000$ eV. Compared to the Leo T and soft-X ray bound, this limit…
We consider generic rotating axially symmetric "dirty" (surrounded by matter) black holes. Near-horizon circular equatorial orbits are examined in two different cases of near-extremal (small surface gravity $\kappa $) and exactly extremal…
Black hole entropy is identified with the counting of the dynamical degrees of freedom of trapped gravitational modes continually sourced by the Hawking-Unruh process. In the context of linear perturbations of Schwarzschild spacetime the…
In the inner regions of an accretion disk around a black hole, the presence of non-thermal protons would via p-p collisions produce electrons, positrons and $\gamma$-rays. For such a scenario, the steady state electron-positron distribution…
Clumps of material orbiting a black hole may be disturbed, somewhat like comets in the Kuiper belt, to relatively small periastron orbits. Each periastron passage changes the orbital parameters in such a way that the orbit becomes more and…
The possibility that dark matter particles could be constituted by extreme regular primordial black holes is discussed. Extreme black holes have zero surface temperature, and are not subjected to the Hawking evaporation process. Assuming…
Hawking radiation acts as a cosmic censor since it carries away the angular momentum of the black hole, proportionally more than its mass. In this work we first show that an extremal black hole cannot exist since it will be pushed away from…
The black hole rigidity theorem asserts that a rotating stationary black hole must be axisymmetric. This theorem holds for General Relativity with suitable matter fields, in four or more dimensions. We show that the theorem can be extended…
Axion stars, gravitationally bound states of low-energy axion particles, have a maximum mass allowed by gravitational stability. Weakly bound states obtaining this maximum mass have sufficiently large radii such that they are dilute, and as…
We investigate quantum effects on topological black hole space-times within the framework of quantum field theory on curved space-times. Considering a quantum scalar field, we extend a recent mode-sum regularization prescription for the…
The initial idea underlying the Weak Gravity Conjecture is that extremal black holes must always be "unstable", in the sense that they should slowly decay by emitting either particles or smaller black holes. Here we show that, when this…
We argue that $(0,1)$ heterotic string models with 4 non-heterotic spacetime dimensions may provide an instability of the vacuum to gravitational polarization in globally strong gravitational fields. This instability would be triggered…
Besides having some very interesting perturbatively unstable orbits, it seems that for a Schwarzschild black hole, below $r=3M$, the force always increases inward with increasing angular momentum. Here this previously known result is…
Two possible explanations for the low luminosity of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy are (1) an accretion rate of order the canonical Bondi value (roughly 10^{-5} solar masses per year), but a very low radiative…
It is widely believed that string theory easily allows for a QCD axion in the cosmologically favoured mass range. The required small decay constant, $f_a\ll M_P$, can be implemented by using a large compactification volume. This points to…
In accordance with current models of the accelerating Universe as a spacetime with a positive cosmological constant, new results about a cosmological upper bound for the area of stable marginally outer trapped surfaces are found taking into…
We present a new constraint for the axion monopole-dipole coupling in the range of 1 micrometer to a few millimeters, previously unavailable for experimental study. The constraint was obtained using our recent results on the observation of…