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-$U$ 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