Blazar Variability: A Study of Non-stationarity and the Flux-RMS Relation

We analyze X-ray light curves of the blazars Mrk 421, PKS 2155-304, and 3C 273 using observations by the Soft X-ray Telescope on board AstroSat and archival XMM-Newton data. We use light curves of length 30-90 ks each from 3-4 epochs for all three blazars. We apply the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model which indicates the variability is consistent with short memory processes for most of the epochs. We show that the power spectral density (PSD) of the X-ray variability of the individual blazars are consistent within uncertainties across the epochs. This implies that the construction of broadband PSD using light curves from different epochs is accurate. However, using certain properties of the variance of the light curves and its segments, we show that the blazars exhibit hints of non-stationarity beyond that due to their characteristic red noise nature in some of those observations. We find a linear relationship between the root-mean-squared amplitude of variability at shorter timescales and the mean flux level at longer timescales for light curves of Mrk 421 across epochs separated by decades as well as light curves spanning 5 days and $\sim$10 yr. The presence of flux-rms relation over very different timescales may imply that, similar to the X-ray binaries and Seyfert galaxies, longer and shorter timescale variability are connected in blazars.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa

Shear Viscosity of hadronic matter at finite temperature and magnetic field

We calculate the transport coefficient of hadronic matter in the presence of temperature and magnetic field using the linear sigma model. In the relaxation time approximation, we estimate the shear viscosity over entropy density $\eta/s$. The point-like interaction rates of hadrons are evaluated through the $S$-matrix approach in the presence of a magnetic field to obtain the temperature and magnetic field-dependent relaxation time. We observe that the transport coefficients are anisotropic in the presence of the magnetic field. We calculate the temperature and magnetic field-dependent anisotropic shear viscosity coefficients by incorporating the estimated relaxation time. The value of viscosity over entropy density is lower in the presence of a magnetic field than the value of it in a thermal medium. The behavior of the perpendicular components of the shear viscosity coefficient is also discussed. We consider the temperature-dependent hadron masses from mean-field effects in this work.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figure

Heavy quark potential and LQCD based quark condensate at finite magnetic field

We have studied various properties of heavy quarkonia in hot and magnetized quark gluon plasma. Inverse magnetic catalysis (IMC) effect is incorporated by modifying the effective quark masses. Then we obtain the real and imaginary part of the heavy quark potential. After evaluating binding energy and decay width we obtain the dissociation temperature of heavy quarkonia in presence of magnetic field.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figure

Anisotropic tomography of heavy quark dissociation by using general propagator structure at finite magnetic field

In this work we have explored the imaginary part of the Heavy Quark (HQ) potential and subsequently the dissociation of heavy quarkonia, within the most general scenario of magnetized hot medium. We have used the general structure of the gauge boson propagator in a hot magnetized medium and derived the most general result for the imaginary HQ potential and the decay width for the heavy quarkonia. In the process we have investigated the rich anisotropic structure of the complex HQ potential which explicitly depends on the longitudinal and transverse distance. We have also compared our full structure rich result with various approximated results available in the literature and explained the differences between them.Comment: 23 pages, 9 figure

Collective modes of gluons in an anisotropic thermo-magnetic medium

We study the collective modes of gluon in an anisotropic thermal medium in presence of a constant background magnetic field using the hard-thermal loop (HTL) perturbation theory. The momentum space anisotropy of the medium has been incorporated through the generalized $`$Romatschke-Strickland' form of the distribution function, whereas, the magnetic modification arising from the quark loop contribution has been taken into account in the lowest Landau level approximation. We consider two special cases: (i) a spheroidal anisotropy with the anisotropy vector orthogonal to the external magnetic field and (ii) an ellipsoidal anisotropy with two mutually orthogonal vectors describing aniostropies along and orthogonal to the field direction. The general structure of the polarization tensor in both cases are equivalent and consists of six independent basis tensors. We find that the introduction of momentum anisotropy ingrains azimuthal angular dependence in the thermo-magnetic collective modes. Our study suggests that the presence of a strong background magnetic field can significantly reduce the growth rate of the unstable modes which may have important implications in the equilibration of magnetized quark-gluon plasma.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure

Impact of chiral asymmetry and magnetic field on passage of an energetic test parton in a QCD medium

We study the dependence of collisional energy loss of a test parton moving with a high velocity on the chiral imbalance and magnetic field in the QCD medium. A semi-classical approach is adopted to estimate the parton energy loss that takes into account the back-reaction on the parton due to the polarization effects of the QCD medium while traversing through the medium. We find that the motion of the parton is sensitive to the chiral asymmetry in the medium. Further, we investigate the effect of magnetic field-induced anisotropy on the energy transfer between the moving parton and the medium. Our results show that the energy loss of the parton is strongly influenced by the strength of the magnetic field as well as the relative orientation of the motion of the parton and the direction of the magnetic field in the medium.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure