Related papers: A model of the ball lightning
Flaring activity in blazars can last for vastly different time-scales, and may be the result of density enhancements in the jet flow that result from the intrusion of an interstellar cloud into the jet. We investigate the lightcurves…
Adapting a plane hydrodynamical model we briefly revisit the study of the impact of a very short and intense laser pulse onto a diluted plasma, the formation of a plasma wave, its wave-breaking, the occurrence of the slingshot effect.
A popular paradigm to explain the rapid temporal variability observed in gamma-ray burst (GRB) lightcurves is the internal shock model. We propose an alternative model in which the radiating fluid in the GRB shell is relativistically…
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond transient astrophysical phenomena and bright at radio frequencies. The emission mechanism, however, remains unsolved yet. One scenario is a coherent emission associated with the magnetar flares and…
In this paper, we introduce techniques for animating explosions and their effects. The primary effect of an explosion is a disturbance that causes a shock wave to propagate through the surrounding medium. This disturbance determines the…
There are striking phenomenological similarities between Fast Radio Bursts and lightning in the Earth's and planetary atmospheres. Both have very low duty factors, $\lesssim 10^{-8}$--$10^{-5}$ for FRB and (very roughly) $\sim 10^{-4}$ for…
Massive stars live fast and die young. They shine furiously for a few million years, during which time they synthesize most of the heavy elements in the universe in their cores. They end by blowing themselves up in a powerful explosion…
The Standard Model of particle physics predicts the speed of light to be a universal speed of propagation of massless carriers. However, other possibilities exist -- including Lorentz-violating theories -- where different fundamental fields…
We consider the physics of neutrinos in a fireball, i.e. a tightly coupled plasma of photons, positrons and electrons. Such a fireball is believed to form in the first stages of a gamma-ray burst. We assume the fireball is…
When illuminated by a laser, nano particles immersed in water can very quickly and strongly heat up, leading to the nucleation of so called vapor bubbles, which have huge application potential in e.g. solar light-harvesting, catalysis, and…
An electron motion in a dense neutrino flux is investigated. The Dirac equation exact solutions for the electron energy and wave function in this external environment are obtained. On this basis we predict the existence of an…
In this paper we conjecture that some specific properties of an electroactive region of thunderclouds play the major role in an initiation of a lightning flash. The electroactive region is modeled here as a quantum two-level system of…
Charged extremal black holes cannot fully evaporate through the Hawking effect and are thus long lived. Over their lifetimes, these black holes take part in a variety of astrophysical processes, including many that lead to their eventual…
Through the modelling of the Spectral Energy Distribution of blazars we can infer the physical parameters required to originate the flux we see. Then we can estimate the power of blazar jets in the form of matter and fields. These estimates…
The radiation we observe from blazars is most likely the product of the transformation of bulk kinetic energy into random energy. This process must have a relatively small efficiency (e.g. 10%) if jets are to power the extended…
The components of blazar jets that emit radiation span a factor of $10^{10}$ in scale. The spatial structure of these emitting regions depends on the observed energy. Photons emitted at different sites cross the lens plane at different…
Time-dependent injection can cause non-linear cooling effects, which lead to a faster energy loss of the electrons in jets. The most obvious result is the appearance of unique breaks in the SED, which would normally be attributed to a…
We present a simple thought experiment in which a beam of light of a finite length (a light-pulse) enters a detection device that consists of a wave detector and a light bulb. We examine the experiment from the reference frame where the…
The recent development of high average, high peak power lasers has revived the effort of using lasers as a potential tool to influence natural lightning. Although impressive, the current progress in laser lightning control technology may…
Laser based lightning control holds a promising way to solve the problem of the long standing disaster of lightning strikes. But it is a challenging project due to insufficient understanding of the interaction between laser plasma channel…