Conveners
Dragging is Never Draggy: MAss and CHarge Flows in GR: Block 1
- Oldrich Semerak (Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Institute of Theoretical Physics)
Description
To spin or not to spin? That is not the only question. In GR, inertia of a body is affected by every other mass-energy present in space-time, whether in sources or in geometry. Thus even “to be” is partially relative. Already before completing his theory, Einstein knew that a particle is heavier if inside a massive shell, and that it becomes dragged along if the shell starts to accelerate. Dragging is still not draggy almost 110 years later: it involves the magnetic component of the field, apparently more imaginative than the electric one, and it very probably drives some of the most exciting phenomena in the Universe, such as jets exhausted from accreting black holes. In this session, we shall be tasting some recent results in the field.
Combined influence of linear boost and rotation of a black hole can distort an ambient magnetic field to the extent that magnetic field lines develop a neutral point, where the magnetic intensity vanishes. This purely geometrical effect interacts with the accretion flow that can carry and distort the frozen-in magnetic lines, too. Near the event horizon, the magnetic null is threaded by a...
Gravitational waves are usually described in terms of a transverse and traceless (TT) tensor, which allows to introduce the so-called TT coordinates. However, another possible approach is based on the use of a Fermi coordinates system, defined in the vicinity of the world-line of an observer arbitrarily moving in spacetime. In particular, Fermi coordinates have a direct operational meaning,...
Extreme mass ratio inspirals (EMRIs) are expected to be a key source of gravitational waves for the LISA mission. In order to extract the maximum amount of information from EMRI observations by LISA, it is important to have an accurate prediction of the expected waveforms. In particular, it will be necessary to have waveforms that incorporate effects that appear at second order in the mass...
Gaia directly measures the kinematics of the stellar component of the Galaxy with the goal to create the largest, most precise three-dimensional map of the Milky Way (MW).
The very core of the Gaia data analysis and processing involves General Relativity (GR) to guarantee accurate scientific products. Nevertheless, any Galactic model should be developed consistently with the...
The LAser RAnged Satellites Experiment (LARASE), funded by the National Scientific Committee 2 (CSN2) of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) in the years 2013-2019, had among its main objectives that of verifying the gravitational interaction in the weak-field and slow-motion limit of General Relativity. Three geodynamic satellites: LAGEOS (NASA, 1976), LAGEOS II...
A rapidly spinning compact object couples to an ambient curved background via the so-called spin-curvature coupling. In expressing this, one has to deal with the ambiguity of the definition of the center of mass of the body. What is worse, in a Hamiltonian formalism, this choice corresponds to an unphysical "parasitic" degree of freedom in the dynamical system. A solution to this is to apply a...
The Lewis solutions describe the exterior gravitational field produced by infinitely long rotating cylinders, and are useful models for global gravitational effects. When the metric parameters are real (Weyl class), the metrics of rotating and static cylinders are locally indistinguishable, but known to globally differ. The significance of this difference, both in terms of concrete physical...
The Unruh De-Witt detector was introduced originally to give an operational meaning to particle detection in curved spacetimes. This simple two level quantum system interacts with the quantum field through a monopole type coupling, possibly exciting it to the excited state in the process. As the vacuum state of the field depends on global features of the background spacetime, the transition...
Black holes power many of the most powerful sources in the universe through their disks, jets and winds. They are powered by their rotational energy (Nature) and by the gravitational energy of accreting gas and stars (Nurture). The balance of these two modes and their implications, will be re-examined in the light of recent, remarkable observations of the nearby galaxy M87 by the Event Horizon...
