Events Daily

Tuesday, April 1, 2025
      

Are We There Yet? First-principles Modeling of Multimessenger sSignals in the Plasma Universe
Bart Ripperda, Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics
Event Type: Astro Seminar
Time: 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM
Location: 726 Broadway, 940, CCPP Seminar
Abstract: Astrophysical black holes are surrounded by accretion disks, jets, and coronae consisting of magnetized relativistic plasma. They produce observable multi wavelength and multi messenger signals from near the event horizon and it is currently unclear how this emission is exactly produced. The electromagnetic radiation typically has a non-thermal component, implying a power-law distribution of emitting relativistic electrons. Magnetic reconnection and plasma turbulence are viable mechanisms to tap the large reservoir of magnetic energy in these systems and accelerate electrons to extreme energies. The accelerated electrons can then emit high-energy photons that themselves may strongly interact with the plasma, rendering a highly nonlinear system. In some cases the electromagnetic emission is accompanied by a multi messenger signal in the form of neutrinos, cosmic rays, or gravitational waves. Modeling the emitting systems necessitates a combination of magnetohydrodynamic models to capture the global dynamics of the formation of dissipation regions, and a kinetic treatment of plasma processes that are responsible for particle acceleration, quantum electrodynamics effects like pair creation and annihilation, and radiation. I will present novel studies of accreting black holes and how they radiate in regions close to black hole event horizon, using both first-principles general relativistic kinetic particle-in-cell simulations and global large-scale three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamics models. With a combination of models, I determine where and how dissipation of magnetic energy occurs, what kind of emission signatures are typically produced, and what they can teach us about the nature of black holes.

A Novel Bispectrum extracting the Kinematic SZ effect as a Cosmological Probe
Raagini Patki, Cornell
Event Type: Informal Astro Talk
Time: 2:00 PM - 2:30 PM
Location: 726 Broadway, 940, CCPP Seminar
Abstract: Over the past decade, the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect has emerged as a unique observational probe of the distribution of baryons and velocity fields in the Universe. In this 30-minute talk, I will briefly review the kSZ effect and present our recent work (arXiv:2411.11974), proposing a novel 'bispectrum' of the form temperature-temperature-density to extract it from cleaned CMB maps. This estimator can utilize any tracer of the large-scale structure density field projected along the line-of-sight and does not require individual redshifts. With this new method, we forecast high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) of ∼100 for the upcoming Simons Observatory (SO) and CMB-S4 correlated with a galaxy sample from WISE that is restricted to the linear regime. We show the SNR peaks for squeezed triangles with a short (linear) density mode and long temperature modes in harmonic space. We study the cosmological dependence of this kSZ signal and forecast initial constraints on the sum of neutrino masses for SO and CMB-S4. Finally, I will discuss the advantages of this estimator and its prospects as a novel probe of baryonic abundance and beyond-ΛCDM cosmology with upcoming precision measurements.

Link to the Event Video