20,180 research outputs found
Shadows and strong gravitational lensing: a brief review
For ultra compact objects (UCOs), Light Rings (LRs) and Fundamental Photon
Orbits (FPOs) play a pivotal role in the theoretical analysis of strong
gravitational lensing effects, and of BH shadows in particular. In this short
review, specific models are considered to illustrate how FPOs can be useful in
order to understand some non-trivial gravitational lensing effects. This paper
aims at briefly overviewing the theoretical foundations of these effects,
touching also some of the related phenomenology, both in General Relativity
(GR) and alternative theories of gravity, hopefully providing some intuition
and new insights for the underlying physics, which might be critical when
testing the Kerr black hole hypothesis.Comment: 32 pages, 9 figures; Review paper in the General Relativity and
Gravitation (GRG) Topical Collection "Testing the Kerr spacetime with
gravitational-wave and electromagnetic observations" (Guest Editor: Emanuele
Berti); v2: Typo corrected and two references adde
Kondo and Dicke effect in quantum-dots side coupled to a quantum wire
Electron tunneling through quantum-dots side coupled to a quantum wire, in
equilibrium and nonequilibrium Kondo regime, is studied. The mean-field
finite- slave-boson formalism is used to obtain the solution of the problem.
We have found that the transmission spectrum shows a structure with two
anti-resonances localized at the renormalized energies of the quantum dots. The
DOS of the system shows that when the Kondo correlations are dominant there are
two Kondo regimes with its own Kondo temperature. The above behavior of the DOS
can be explained by quantum interference in the transmission through the two
different resonance states of the quantum dots coupled to common leads. This
result is analogous to the Dicke effect in optics. We investigate the many body
Kondo states as a function of the parameters of the system.Comment: 5 figures. To appear in Phys. Rev.
Apparent and actual galaxy cluster temperatures
The redshift evolution of the galaxy cluster temperature function is a
powerful probe of cosmology. However, its determination requires the
measurement of redshifts for all clusters in a catalogue, which is likely to
prove challenging for large catalogues expected from XMM--Newton, which may
contain of order 2000 clusters with measurable temperatures distributed around
the sky. In this paper we study the apparent cluster temperature, which can be
obtained without cluster redshifts. We show that the apparent temperature
function itself is of limited use in constraining cosmology, and so concentrate
our focus on studying how apparent temperatures can be combined with other
X-ray information to constrain the redshift. We also briefly study the
circumstances in which non-thermal spectral features can give redshift
information.Comment: 7 pages LaTeX file with 13 figures incorporated (uses mn.sty and
epsf). Minor changes to match MNRAS accepted versio
Vorticity and magnetic shielding in a type-II superconductor
We study in detail, solving the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations, the magnetic
field, supercurrent and order parameter profiles originated by a solenoid or
magnetic whisker inserted in a type-II superconductor. We consider solutions of
different vorticities, n, in the various cases. The results confirm the
connection between the vorticity, the internal currents and the boundstates in
a self-consistent way. The number of boundstates is given by the vorticity of
the phase of the gap function as in the case with no external solenoid. In the
limiting case of an infinitely thin solenoid, like a Dirac string, the solution
is qualitatively different. The quasiparticle spectrum and wave functions are a
function of n-n_ext, where n_ext is the vorticity of the solenoid. The flux is
in all cases determined by the vorticity of the gap function.Comment: revised version, 25 pages, LaTex, 10 figure
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