A large accretion disk of extreme eccentricity in the TDE ASASSN-14li

In the canonical model for tidal disruption events (TDEs), the stellar debris circularizes quickly to form an accretion disk of size about twice the orbital pericenter of the star. Most TDEs and candidates discovered in the optical/UV have broad optical emission lines with complex and diverse profiles of puzzling origin. Liu et al. recently developed a relativistic elliptical disk model of constant eccentricity in radius for the broad optical emission lines of TDEs and well reproduced the double-peaked line profiles of the TDE candidate PTF09djl with a large and extremely eccentric accretion disk. In this paper, we show that the optical emission lines of the TDE ASASSN-14li with radically different profiles are well modelled with the relativistic elliptical disk model, too. The accretion disk of ASASSN-14li has an eccentricity 0.97 and semimajor axis of 847 times the Schwarzschild radius (r_S) of the black hole (BH). It forms as the consequence of tidal disruption of a star passing by a massive BH with orbital pericenter 25r_S. The optical emission lines of ASASSN-14li are powered by an extended X-ray source of flat radial distribution overlapping the bulk of the accretion disk and the single-peaked asymmetric line profiles are mainly due to the orbital motion of the emitting matter within the disk plane of inclination about 26\degr and of pericenter orientation closely toward the observer. Our results suggest that modelling the complex line profiles is powerful in probing the structures of accretion disks and coronal X-ray sources in TDEs.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in the MNRA

Isotropic and Anisotropic Regimes of the Field-Dependent Spin Dynamics in Sr2IrO4: Raman Scattering Studies

A major focus of experimental interest in Sr2IrO4 has been to clarify how the magnetic excitations of this strongly spin-orbit coupled system differ from the predictions of anisotropic 2D spin-1/2 Heisenberg model and to explore the extent to which strong spin-orbit coupling affects the magnetic properties of iridates. Here, we present a high-resolution inelastic light (Raman) scattering study of the low energy magnetic excitation spectrum of Sr2IrO4 and doped Eu-doped Sr2IrO4 as functions of both temperature and applied magnetic field. We show that the high-field (H>1.5 T) in-plane spin dynamics of Sr2IrO4 are isotropic and governed by the interplay between the applied field and the small in-plane ferromagnetic spin components induced by the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. However, the spin dynamics of Sr2IrO4 at lower fields (H<1.5 T) exhibit important effects associated with interlayer coupling and in-plane anisotropy, including a spin-flop transition at Hc in Sr2IrO4 that occurs either discontinuously or via a continuous rotation of the spins, depending upon the in-plane orientation of the applied field. These results show that in-plane anisotropy and interlayer coupling effects play important roles in the low-field magnetic and dynamical properties of Sr2IrO4.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, submitte

Possible Weyl fermions in the magnetic Kondo system CeSb

Materials where the electronic bands have unusual topologies allow for the realization of novel physics and have a wide range of potential applications. When two electronic bands with linear dispersions intersect at a point, the excitations could be described as Weyl fermions which are massless particles with a particular chirality. Here we report evidence for the presence of Weyl fermions in the ferromagnetic state of the low-carrier density, strongly correlated Kondo lattice system CeSb, from electronic structure calculations and angle-dependent magnetoresistance measurements. When the applied magnetic field is parallel to the electric current, a pronounced negative magnetoresistance is observed within the ferromagnetic state, which is destroyed upon slightly rotating the field away. These results give evidence for CeSb belonging to a new class of Kondo lattice materials with Weyl fermions in the ferromagnetic state.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures, Supplementary Information available from journal link (open access

Pion-photon and photon-pion transition form factors in light-cone formalism

We derive the minimal Fock-state expansions of the pion and the photon wave functions in light-cone formalism, then we calculate the pion-photon and the photon-pion transition form factors of $\gamma ^{\ast}\pi ^{0}\to \gamma$ and $\gamma ^{\ast}\gamma \to \pi ^{0}$ processes by employing these quark-antiquark wave functions of the pion and the photon. We find that our calculation for the $\gamma ^{\ast}\gamma \to \pi ^{0}$ transition form factor agrees with the experimental data at low and moderately high energy scale. Moreover, the physical differences and inherent connections between the transition form factors of $\gamma ^{\ast}\pi ^{0}\to \gamma$ and $\gamma ^{\ast}\gamma \to \pi ^{0}$ have been illustrated, which indicate that these two physical processes are intrinsically related. In addition, we also discuss the $\pi ^{0}\to \gamma \gamma$ form factor and the decay width $\mathit{\Gamma}(\pi \to \gamma \gamma)$ at $Q^{2}=0$.Comment: 20 pages, 2 figure