The present upper limit on the amount of tensor perturbations (primordial gravitational waves) generated during inflation, the tensor-to-scalar ratio r < 0.03, excludes many inflationary models popular in the past, like those with a power-law inflaton potential (‘chaotic inflation’). However, a number of viable inflationary models still remain including the three one-parametric models: the...
The huge luminosity, the redshift distribution extending at least up to z∼10 and the association with the explosive death of very massive stars make long GRBs (i.e., those lasting up to a few minutes) potentially extremely powerful probes for shedding light on main open issues in our understanding of the early Universe: star formation rate evolution up to the first generation of stars...
Interest to astrophysical evidence for primordial black holes formed in the early Universe from initial cosmological perturbation has increased after the discovery of coalescing binary black holes with masses more than dozen solar ones by gravitational-wave observatories. I will discuss the formation channels of merging binary black holes with a special focus on the possibility that some...
Titarchuk, Lev (University of Ferrara, Italy and Seifina, Elena (GAISH, MSU, Russia
In 2017 the work on the Comptonization (Sunyaev-Titarchuk) seen in the X-ray spectra of astrophysical sources was a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Physics. In this talk I provide all the details of the exciting prehistory of this topic and precise details of this discovery. The solution of this...
Strong electromagnetic fields polarize the vacuum and electric fields produce charged pairs, the so-called Schwinger effect. The critical strength of electromagnetic fields, whose energy density equals to the rest mass of the charge, cannot be achieved in present laboratories. The critical electric fields enormously produce electron-positron pairs and the critical magnetic field has the lowest...
We consider the decay of a particle with some energy E_0 > 0 inside the ergosphere of a black hole. After the first decay, one of particles with the energy E_1 < 0 falls towards a black hole while the second one with E_2 > E_0 moves in the outward direction. It bounces back from a reflecting shell and, afterwards, the process repeats. For radial motion of charged particles in the...
We analyze the “ballistic method” of rotational energy extraction from an Kerr black hole (BH) by massive particle decay in the BH ergosphere pioneered by Roger Penrose. We focus on the negative energy counterrotating particles in-going to the horizon and evaluate the feedback on the BH irreducible mass (∆Mirr > |E1|). The change in irreducible mass is a function of the ratio of...
In the context of reversible vs. irreversible transformations of a black hole, Christodoulou and Ruffini introduced the notion of irreducible mass, which is related to the event horizon area. The area of the event horizon was subsequently interpreted as the black hole entropy by Hawking and Bekenstein. Furthermore, Penrose conjectured the Weyl curvature hypothesis: the Weyl curvature is a...
Gamma-ray bursts (GRB) are the most energetic explosions that occur naturally in distant galaxies [1]. Their analysis facilitates the probing of early Universe and its expansion, the understanding of stellar evolution, the analysis of high energy phenomena and of the matter under extreme conditions [2, 3, 4]. GRBs constitute excellent natural laboratory settings to test the fundamental physics...
