Laws of Black Hole Mechanics from Holst Action

The formulation of Weak Isolated Horizons (WIH) based on the Isolated Horizon formulation of black hole horizons is reconsidered. The first part of the paper deals with the derivation of laws of mechanics of a WIH. While the zeroth law follows from the WIH boundary conditions, first law depends on the action chosen. We construct the covariant phase space for a spacetime having an WIH as inner boundary for the Holst action. This requires the introduction of new potential functions so that the symplectic structure is foliation independent. We show that a precise cancellation among various terms leads to the usual first law for WIH. Subsequently, we show from the same covariant phase space that for spherical horizons, the topological theory on the inner boundary is a U(1) Chern-Simons theory.Comment: References added, Minor Corrections 25 pages 1 fi

The Chandrasekhar limit for quark stars

The Chandrasekhar limit for quark stars is evaluated from simple energy balance relations, as proposed by Landau for white dwarfs or neutron stars. It has been found that the limit for quark stars depends on, in addition to the fundamental constants, the Bag constant.Comment: LateX fil

Anisotropic s-wave superconductivity in single crystals CaAlSi from penetration depth measurements

In- and out-of-plane London penetration depths were measured in single crystals CaAlSi (T_{c}=6.2 K and 7.3 K) using a tunnel-diode resonator. A full 3D BCS analysis of the superfluid density is consistent with a prolate spheroidal gap, with a weak-coupling BCS value in the ab-plane and stronger coupling along the c-axis. The gap anisotropy was found to significantly decrease for higher T_{c} samples.Comment: 4 page

The spin dependence of the Blandford-Znajek effect

The interaction of large scale magnetic fields with the event horizon of rotating black holes (the Blandford-Znajek [1977] mechanism) forms the basis for some models of the most relativistic jets. We explore a scenario in which the central inward "plunging" region of the accretion flow enhances the trapping of large scale poloidal field on the black hole. The study is carried out using a fully relativistic treatment in Kerr spacetime, with the focus being to determine the spin dependence of the Blandford-Znajek effect. We find that large scale magnetic fields are enhanced on the black hole compared to the inner accretion flow and that the ease with which this occurs for lower prograde black hole spin, produces a spin dependence in the Blandford-Znajek effect that has attractive applications to recent observations. Among these is the correlation between inferred accretion rate and nuclear jet power observed by Allen et al. (2006) in X-ray luminous elliptical galaxies. If the black hole rotation in these elliptical galaxies is in the prograde sense compared with that of the inner accretion disk, we show that both the absolute value and the uniformity of the implied jet-production efficiency can be explained by the flux-trapping model. The basic scenario that emerges from this study is that a range of intermediate values of black hole spins could be powering these AGN. We also suggest that the jets in the most energetic radio-galaxies may be powered by accretion onto {\it retrograde} rapidly-rotating black holes.Comment: ApJ accepte

Variation of the gas and radiation content in the sub-Keplerian accretion disk around black holes and its impact to the solutions

We investigate the variation of the gas and the radiation pressure in accretion disks during the infall of matter to the black hole and its effect to the flow. While the flow far away from the black hole might be non-relativistic, in the vicinity of the black hole it is expected to be relativistic behaving more like radiation. Therefore, the ratio of gas pressure to total pressure (beta) and the underlying polytropic index (gamma) should not be constant throughout the flow. We obtain that accretion flows exhibit significant variation of beta and then gamma, which affects solutions described in the standard literature based on constant beta. Certain solutions for a particular set of initial parameters with a constant beta do not exist when the variation of beta is incorporated appropriately. We model the viscous sub-Keplerian accretion disk with a nonzero component of advection and pressure gradient around black holes by preserving the conservations of mass, momentum, energy, supplemented by the evolution of beta. By solving the set of five coupled differential equations, we obtain the thermo-hydrodynamical properties of the flow. We show that during infall, beta of the flow could vary upto ~300%, while gamma upto ~20%. This might have a significant impact to the disk solutions in explaining observed data, e.g. super-luminal jets from disks, luminosity, and then extracting fundamental properties from them. Hence any conclusion based on constant gamma and beta should be taken with caution and corrected.Comment: 22 pages including 8 figures; published in New Astronom

Agarose-stabilized gold nanoparticles for surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopic detection of DNA nucleosides

doi:10.1063/1.2192573 http://scitation.aip.org/getpdf/servlet/GetPDFServlet?filetype=pdf&id=APPLAB000088000015153114000001&idtype=cvips&prog=normal&doi=10.1063/1.2192573We present surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) studies of DNA nucleosides using biologically benign agarose-stabilized gold nanoparticles (AAuNP). We compare the SERS activity of nucleosides with AAuNP to that of commercially obtained citrate-stabilized gold nanoparticles and find the SERS activity to be an order of magnitude higher with AAuNP. The higher SERS activity is explained in terms of the agarose matrix, which provides pathways for the gold nanoparticles to have distinct arrangements that result in stronger internal plasmon resonances.This work was supported through the University of Missouri Research Board grants URB04-023 (S.G.) and URB03-080 (M.C. and K.V.K.), NSF under Grant No. DMR-0413601and the NCI under Grant No. IR0ICA119412-01. The gold nanoparticles were produced and supplied by the University of Missouri Nanoparticle Production Core Facility