Conveners
Monday afternoon session
- Hansjoerg Dittus (University of Bremen)
Our Universe is filled with cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) which is isotropic and has the black body spectrum with temperature 2.7 Kelvin. No spectral deviations from a black body have been detected in the CMB monopole until now. However, the physics of the interaction of CMB photons with hot electrons predicted the presence of "shadows" in the angular distribution of CMB in the...
If a rotation-powered (non-accreting) pulsar is in a binary with a high-mass star, then the collision of the relativistic pulsar wind with the stellar wind creates an intrabinary shock, generating high-energy radiation. In addition, the shocked pulsar and stellar winds can leave the binary and form a nebula whose properties should vary with the orbital phase. To search for such a nebula, we...
We address i) the point-particle assumption inherent to non-quantum physics. It is singular and entails divergences. ii) In quantum mechanics (QM) EM plays an asymmetric role. It acts on QM fields, but the latter does not react back. We suggest a mutual action-reaction partnership between the two. By so doing, QM fields share their analyticity with EM fields and remove the singularities. iii)...
25 years after the discovery of the first GRB/SN, SN1998bw remains the best observed example of this extraordinary class of events. Several other GRB/SNe have been discovered, allowing progress in determining their overall properties.
I will review some of the advances and outline the outstanding problems in this field.
Observations support the idea that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) power the emission at the center of active galaxies. However, contrary to stellar-mass BHs, there is a poor understanding of their origin and physical formation channel. In this article, we propose a new process of SMBH formation in the early Universe that is not associated with baryonic matter (massive stars) or primordial...
