Astrophysics

A recently discovered class of active galactic nuclei, TeV luminous blazars, constitute a small fraction of the power output of black holes. Nevertheless, there are suggestions that unlike the UV and X-ray luminosity of quasars, the very-high energy gamma-ray emission from the TeV blazars can be thermalized on cosmological scales with order unity efficiency, resulting in a potentially dramatic heating of the low-density intergalactic medium. The way in which this occurs, however, imparts a variety of peculiar properties to this novel heating source, resulting in a number of robust cosmological consequences. I will discuss the process by which TeV blazars heat the Universe, the strange properties that this heating has, and the variety of signatures that it has left behind, many of which have already been observed!

I will introduce the gravitational microlensing, its application to the compact dark matter detection and the extra-solar planet observations. EROS has been performed the microlensing observation in four directions of the Galactic plane, away from the Galactic center. I will report the observational results and the interpret the data within the Standard Galactic model. As a result we extract the best fit to the dust contribution in the Galactic disk, orientation of the Galactic bar and the abundance of the red giants compare to local stellar distribution.

I'll discuss how to systematically construct a (d+2)-dimensional solution of the vacuum Einstein equations that is dual to a (d+1)-dimensional fluid satisfying the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations with specific higher-derivative corrections. The solution takes the form of a non-relativistic gradient expansion that is in direct correspondence with the hydrodynamic expansion of the dual fluid. The dual fluid has nevertheless an underlying description in terms of relativistic hydrodynamics, with the unusual property of having a vanishing equilibrium energy density. Using the gravitational results, as well as an interesting and exact constraint on its stress tensor, we identify the transport coefficients of the dual fluid. A simple Lagrangian model is sufficient to realise its key properties.